AUDIENCE RECEPTIVENESS, THE MEDIA, AND AGED SUICIDE, 1968-1980

The literature on imitative suicides has been marked by poor theory, including the neglect of the concept of audience responsiveness. Drawing from a symbolic interactionist perspective, the present paper incorporates Blumer's concept of audience receptivity. It takes the elderly as the social age group apt to be most receptive to publicized suicide stories, given their suicidogenic life circumstances such as economic strains, social isolation, and physical illness. Time series techniques are applied to national data on monthly suicide rates and televised publicized news stories on suicide. Months with publicized suicides are found to have 10 additional elderly suicides (mean elderly monthly suicides is 369). The imitative suicide effect was increased to 19 suicides when the analysis was restricted to stories about elderly suicides, a finding that suggests age identification in imitative suicide. Further analysis found an effect for both females and males, in spite of lower suicidal behavior associated with the aged female role. Noncelebrity suicide stories were unrelated, however, to elderly suicide. The suggestion effects were independent of changes in unemployment and season. © 1990.