Citation

Neumayer E. Urban Stud. 2003; 40(13): 2769-2776.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2003, Urban Studies Journal Limited, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1080/0042098032000191029

PMID

unavailable

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.

Language: en