World: Morale – Suicide

June 13, 2007 at 10:18 am (Asia, OECD, Social, Statistic, World)

Following the World Morale series, the next question such as below was asked in World Values Survey:

Justifiable: Suicide

The answer in the scale form was given, running from 1-10, 1 being “never justifiable” and 10 being “always justifiable”. The mean score given from all the participants in the respective country is shown in the graphs below:

1) OECD/developed countries:

Compared to euthanasia, people’s acceptance towards suicide is lower. However, people in countries like Netherlands, France, Sweden, Luxembourg and Switzerland are giving higher score compared to others, in terms of whether is suicide justifiable or not. On the other hand, most of the people in Hungary, Mexico, Ireland, Iceland and Portugal are thinking  that suicide is “never justifiable” (their scores closed to 1).

2) Selected Asia countries:

In Asia, Japan and Korea, which incidentally have high suicide rate (among OECD countries), are scoring 3.03 and 2.77 point respectively, ranked highest among the selected countries. On the other hand, people in Islamic countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia think that suicide is “never justifiable”.

An interesting note is that is there any correlation on the opinion on suicide and euthanasia? The graph below shows the scatter-plot between these 2 opinions’ scores:

There is a moderately strong and positive correlation (Rsquare=0.623) between “euthanasia” and “suicide”: the more people’s opinion in acceptance towards euthanasia, the same will go for their opinion on suicide as well. However, the opinion of “suicide is justifiable” is consistently lower than “euthanasia is justifiable”.

Update: The opinion on suicide should be compared to the actual suicide rate (2004) in these countries as well, as shown in the graph below:

There is no correlation between what is people’s attitude towards suicide and the actual suicide rate among OECD countries. As a matter of fact, even though most of the Hungrarian think that suicide is not justifiable, however their suicide rate is the highest among the selectec countries here. On the other hand, people in Netherlands and Sweden who were thinking that suicide is more “justifiable” than other countries have lower suicide rate: 4.36 and 4.11 persons per 100 000 population, in year 2004.