Registering Sudden Deaths: Official Definitions and Procedures

Abstract

One of the main criticisms of the work on suicide by Jack Douglas which was raised in the previous chapter was that, although he deals at some length with the problematic nature of definitions of suicide in his section on official statistics, he focuses on situations already defined as suicidal when it comes to demonstrating his research method. In other words, like previous suicide researchers, he leaves the question of how suicides become identified and categorized as such empirically open, in spite of pleas such as the following that research into the work of the officials responsible for registering sudden deaths should be carried out:

The final and most certain answer to the question of the reliability and validity of the official statistics on suicide can be given only by intensive and extensive empirical investigation of the methods, implicit and explicit assumption, etc., of the officials who are responsible for the statistics on suicide … [Douglas, 1967, p. 229].

The idea that there are or may be many different definitions and different types of definitions of suicide leads immediately to a bewilderingly complex situation from the point of view of doing empirical research into the subject.