The central objective is to test the hypothesis: the greater the media's coverage of suicide stories, the greater the national suicide rate. In addition, the study also tests a nonadditive model wherein pre-existant suicidogenic moods in the audience interact with the stories to trigger additional suicides. Control variables from other prominent theories of suicide are included in order to test for spuriousness in the zero order relationship, to correct for model misspecification, and to weight the relative importance of the suggestion factor against other variables including the rates of unemployment and divorce. The study develops and tests a theory of differential identification with the stories' victims: first through matching the stories' victims and the national suicide rate on age/sex, and race, second through a multiple classification scheme based on the victims motives including poor health and marital problems, and through other streams of identification including socio-economic status and celebrity status of the stories; victims. Data on three different eras (1910-1929; 1929-39; 1950-1981) are analyzed to test for both historical contextual factors as well as for the influence of the development of the mass media itself from printed to electronic communication. The scope of suicidal behavior includes completed suicides and also the neglected categories of hidden or parasuicidal behavior: """"""""autocide,"""""""" poisonings, fatal falls, and deaths from undetermined violent causes. A test of regional identification will be done using a special dataset for New York City and the state of New York. Another special dataset on daily counts of suicide between 1972 and 1980 will be mined for pinpointing the suggestion effect. Statistical techniques include Cochrane-Orcutt iterative time series analysis, test for autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity, and Almon distributed lags analysis. The results will be relevant to the more general issue of the influence of suggestion of social life and to the public's concern with youthful suicide clusters such as those in Westchester County, New York, St. Stephen's Wyoming, and, most recently, the tragic deaths of several teenagers in a high school in Omaha, Nebraska in February, 1986.
| Stack, S (1993) The media and suicide: a nonadditive model, 1968-1980. Suicide Life Threat Behav 23:63-6 |
| Stack, S (1992) The effect of the media on suicide: the Great Depression. Suicide Life Threat Behav 22:255-67 |
| Stack, S (1990) A reanalysis of the impact of non celebrity suicides. A research note. Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol 25:269-73 |
| Stack, S (1989) The effect of publicized mass murders and murder-suicides on lethal violence, 1968-1980. A research note. Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol 24:202-8 |
| Stack, S (1988) Suicide: media impacts in war and peace, 1910-1920. Suicide Life Threat Behav 18:342-57 |
| Stack, S (1987) The sociological study of suicide: methodological issues. Suicide Life Threat Behav 17:133-50 |
