The importance of 'morality' in the social construction of suicide in Scottish newspapers

Autor: Joanne Coyle, Doreen MacWhannell
Rok vydání: 2002
Předmět:
Zdroj: Sociology of Health & Illness. 24:689-713
ISSN: 1467-9566
0141-9889
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9566.00314
Popis: Suicide stories in newspapers have been identified as an important risk factor for individual suicide because they provide real-life models for vulnerable individuals. The link between suicide ‘stories’ and suicide rates, however, is not clearly understood. One problem is the lack of detailed analysis of how suicide stories are constructed. Yet this is important because it would enable researchers to comprehend more fully how newspaper reports shape and structure ‘reality’. It is argued that the suicide story is a way of mapping out reality and that by de-constructing we can learn how this shapes and constrains our understanding of suicide and the actions adopted in response to it. The aim of this study, therefore, is to explore the social construction of suicide stories in Scottish newspapers. Two broad sheet and two tabloid newspapers were scanned for suicide stories for the year 1999. One hundred and ninety-one articles reporting suicide were identified and analysed using grounded theory. This generated a set of conceptual categories, which formed the basis of a framework. The study found that visualising, locating, social impacting and causal searching were key concepts in the construction of a suicide story, and that these were connected through the core explanatory category of ‘morality’. The study also showed how suicide was rendered explicable through the concepts of deviancy, dysfunction and moral weakness.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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