Who Are More Vulnerable? County Differentials of Age, Gender Specific Suicide Rates of South Korea

• In Event: 598 - Section on Sociology of Mental Health Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. Suicide

Abstract

Suicide is being one of the most prevalent causes of deaths in South Korea, representing significant abnormality of the society. Not only the uprising trend of suicide rate, but also diverged gap of suicide rate among age groups and gender need to be considered as a severe social disorder in current South Korea. Nevertheless, a large portion of studies about suicide in South Korea have been concentrated on researches dealing with suicidal ideation and psychological disorders based on small surveys by individual researchers due to lack of data completed suicide. Therefore, I conducted this study to test and find appropriate determinants of diverged gap of suicide rate between age groups and gender in 2005 and 2010. I utilized and constructed county level data by using administrative units as basic unit of analysis. With various county level indicators as predictors of multiple regression model, I found diverged suicide rate by age and gender among counties. Compared with younger generations, middle and old age groups were more likely to have significant different suicide rates by counties. Also, male were more likely to show dramatic divergence of suicide rate than female. Overall, living in less populated, developed, younger, active counties was associated with higher suicide rate. However, living in counties have more family stability and education level was associated with lower suicide rate. Relatively, suicide rate was less diverged in 2010 than 2005, possibly affected by evenly distributed but increased risk of suicide by being worsened economic status of South Korea.

Author

• Jaein Lee, University of Maryland-College Park