Emile Durkheim - assignments PDF

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Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) Like many early sociologists, Durkheim agreed that sociology should be seen from a scientific point of view however his ideas were different because he had noticed that earlier sociologists were not using any kind of scientific method to study this new science. Durkheim believed that if sociology was going to be a science it must have its own subject matter and social theory. The social theory he had come to was the concept of social facts. Social facts were social forces that were external to the individual yet could constrain them. When studying these social facts Durkheim believed it was best to treat them like things. He wants humans to just be objects in nature and the social phenomena that occurred in their lives to just be events in nature. The goal of his social theory was to have an explanation of events that occurred in life. Durkheim came in terms that there could be two types of explanations in life, casual and functional explanations. Functional explanations were the consequences of social phenomenon for the operation of society as a whole whereas casual explanations involved the search for pre-existing conditions to explain how a given effect could occur in everyday life. Durkheim wanted to test his hypothesis of casual explanations against reality because that is how he would be able to receive answers for his study. In order to assess the hypothesis Durkheim decided to study suicides. When studying the idea of suicide, Durkheim did not attach meaning to why the suicide had occurred rather he studied the rates of suicide. The rates were the social facts which meant they were recognized as a property of society. One thing Durkheim had notice while studying these rates was the fact that they were stable across time. As he continued he also noted how the rates perceives the nation that they were obtained from as they varied across difference societies. England had twice as many suicides as Italy and Denmark had four times that of England. Durkheim started to analyze the data which was collected over time and came to the realization that it was the lowest in Catholic societies, much higher in protestant societies, and an average of the two in mixed societies. Durkheim began to find casual explanations between these differences, some of these explanations involved:  Inherited mental disorder  Religious belief systems  Level of integration of society Some of these were used while others did not provide sufficient enough information for the study to be considered scientific. For the explanation of inherited mental disorders, Durkheim was unable to use this because it was a property of an individual rather than the society the individual had lived in. For the second explanation of religious belief systems he was unable to use that as well because he noticed that in both Catholic and Protestant societies, the concept of suicide was not allowed within the two religions. Finally, however Durkheim was able to use one of his explanations which was the level of integration within a society. Durkheim was able to manipulate this because he wanted to argue how each religion dealt with hardships and suicide. To summarize his findings, he noticed that within the Protestant religions the people stood alone before God whereas in Catholicism there was a priest to guide the individual and God’s relationship. Due to these differences Durkheim was able to create this inverse relationship between integration and the suicide rates. Depending on the direction of the relationship a different cause would be met which had a difference effect on the individual....