Urbanism and Suicide: A Study of American Counties

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Abstract
This study employs data from 3,108 counties in the United States to examine the effects of urbanism and a number of other variables on suicide. Grouping the counties into three categories (most urban, middle urban, rural) reveals a surprising difference in the relative capacity of sociological variables to explain the incidence of suicide within each context. Sociological variables in the most urban counties tend to have a much stronger explanatory power than in the rural or middle urban counties. These results suggest that most sociological explanations for suicide apply primarily to urban environments and not rural ones. As Fischer (1982) has shown, types of relations which prevail in urban communities may be better conduits for social structural influences than those in rural environments. Structural explanations for suicide, therefore, may be best suited for urban environments and may be largely limited to them.

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