Societal Integration, Culture, and Period: Their Impact on Female Age-Specific Suicide Rates in 20 Developed Countries, 1955–1989

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Abstract
This work uses Durkheimian societal integration measures and proxies for the culture of suicide to test for differences in the impact of predictors on suicide rates of younger and older women and for change in the effect of predictors over time. Four integration measures (female labor force participation, divorce rates, fertility, and religious book production) retained the same sign in all age groups, and their unstandardized regression coefficients typically increased as the mean suicide rate of the age group increased through ages 55–64, before declining. The culture of suicide (measured with attitudinal data or regional proxies) had much stronger effects on the explained variance of women 65 and older than on women 15–64. With controls on societal integration and region, the pattern of declining female suicide rates after 1970, as predicted by “institutional adjustment” theorists, did not appear.