Poverty, Inequality, and Suicide Rates: A Cross-National Assessment of the Durkheim Theory and the Stream Analogy of Lethal Violence

ABSTRACT

This study draws on the theories of Emile Durkheim and the Stream Analogy of Lethal Violence to examine the effect of poverty on suicide rates across 15 Western European nations and the United States between 1993 and 2000. To achieve our goal, we take advantage of absolute and relative poverty measures, along with infant mortality rates, utilized in recent cross-national research on homicide rates. The results from fixed-effects regression models reveal that relative poverty rather than absolute poverty and infant mortality rates are positively related to suicide rates, net of economic development. In addition, we find relative poverty and infant mortality rates to yield significant effects on the suicide-homicide ratio and total violence rates. This study concludes with a discussion of the role of relative poverty in predicting different manifestations of lethal violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Crime; deviance; inequality; poverty; Durkheim; the Stream Analogy of Lethal Violence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In additional analysis, we performed regression diagnostics for the presence of influential observations and multicollinearity. The results from the analysis of the variance inflation factors revealed that multicollinearity is not a problem in the presented regression models, indicating the highest variance inflation factor of 2.45 for GDP per capita in Model 7 in Table 3. This is below the recommended cutoff (10). To detect potential outliers, we examined scatterplots, studentized residuals, and leverage values. Four observations particularly stood out as influential cases in the estimated regression models: Finland in 1995, Ireland in 1993, Luxemburg in 1997, and Luxemburg in 2000. Substantive results were highly similar to the ones presented in the manuscript when these four observations were excluded from the regression models. There were two noteworthy exceptions, however. Specifically, after removing the cases of Ireland in 1993 and Luxemburg in 2000 from Model 1 and Model 7 in Table 6, respectively, we found that the absolute poverty measure and Gini index exhibited negative effects on the suicide-homicide ratio. This is in line with previous findings (Chon 2013; He et al. 2003; Prabha and Whitt 1992; Unnithan et al. 1994). These effects became nonsignificant, however, once control variables were incorporated into the models.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sylwia J. Piatkowska

Sylwia J. Piatkowska is an assistant professor in the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University. Her areas of interest include immigration and crime, suicide, hate crime, policing, and comparative criminology.