The DOI matches its Crossref record; 2 of the 2 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Imitative Suicides: A National Study of the Effects of Television News Stories
Abstract
A 1974 ASR paper by Phillips showed that suicides increase in the month of highly publicized suicide stories. Several subsequent papers have built on this finding and have suggested that publicized suicide stories trigger increases in covert suicides disguised as motor vehicle or airplane accidents. If the original ASR findings cannot be replicated, then doubt is cast on all these studies. In this paper we demonstrate that U.S. daily suicides increase significantly after highly publicized suicide stories appear on television evening news programs. We provide the first evidence that the increase in suicides occurs only after and not before the suicide story. In addition, we provide the first systematic study of the length of time a suicide story affects suicides; the effect probably does not extend beyond ten days. These findings support and extend the literature on imitative suicides.
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Citations
Cites
Phillips, D. P. (1974) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.2307/2094294 · Cited by 1,063
Suicide, motor vehicle fatalities, and the mass media: evidence toward a theory of suggestion.
Phillips, D. P. (1979) · American Journal of Sociology · doi:10.1086/226904 · Cited by 189
Self-citation
Cited by
Suicide: A 15‐Year Review of the Sociological Literature Part I: Cultural and Economic Factors
Stack, S. (2000) · Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior · doi:10.1111/j.1943-278x.2000.tb01073.x · Cited by 503
Berkowitz, L. (1984) · Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.1037/0033-2909.95.3.410 · Cited by 494
Shaffer, D., & Pfeffer, C. R. (2001) · Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry · doi:10.1097/00004583-200107001-00003 · Cited by 460
Media contagion and suicide among the young
Gould, M., Jamieson, P., & Romer, D. (2003) · American Behavioral Scientist · doi:10.1177/0002764202250670 · Cited by 429
Clustering of teenage suicides after television news stories about suicide
Phillips, D. P., & Carstensen, L. L. (1986) · New England Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1056/nejm198609113151106 · Cited by 387
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Bollen, K. A., & Phillips, D. P.
- Venue
- American Sociological Review
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 1982-12
- Volume
- 47
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 802
- ISSN
- 0003-1224 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2011107800
- Cited by
- 214
- References
- 2
- FWCI
- 5.59
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Bollen, K. A., & Phillips, D. P. (1982). Imitative Suicides: A National Study of the Effects of Television News Stories. American Sociological Review. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095217
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
