Socioeconomic Factors and Suicide Rates at Large-unit Aggregate Levels: A Comment

Abstract

Can socioeconomic factors seemingly explain variation in suicide rates at large-unit aggregate levels only due to an ecological fallacy? This is what Kunce and Anderson (2002) suggest based on fixed-effects estimation of US state suicide rates, in which they find little evidence that socioeconomic factors matter. This paper demonstrates that this result does not hold true for other large-unit aggregate levels in an analysis of suicide at the cross-national level. It is found that many socioeconomic factors have a statistically significant impact. It is concluded that sociological and economic theories explaining variation in suicide rates at the large-unit aggregate level with the help of aggregate socioeconomic factors cannot simply be dismissed because of an alleged ecological fallacy.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 81 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.