Wasn’t there a somewhat well-publicized “spate” of suicides at a large French telecom a while back? I remember the explanation being the same—the number observed was just about what you’d expect for an employer of that size.
Even if the suicide rate was somewhat higher than average it still doesn’t necessarily tell you much. You should really be looking at the probability of that number of suicides occurring in some distinct subset of the population—given all the subsets of a population that you can identify you will expect some to have higher than suicide rates than for the population as a whole. The relevant question is ‘what is the probability that you would observe this number of suicides by chance in some randomly selected subset of this size?’
Incidentally the rate appears to be below that of Cambridge University students:
RESULTS: We identified 157 student deaths during academic years 1970-1996, of which 36 appeared to be suicides. The overall suicide rate was 11.3/100,000 person years at risk. Suicide rates were similar to those seen amongst 15- to 24-year-olds in the general population. There were non-significant trends for male postgraduates to be over-represented and first-year undergraduates under-represented. Examination times were not associated with excess suicide. CONCLUSIONS: Suicide rates in University of Cambridge students do not appear to be unduly high.
Yes, this is my counter-counter-criticism as well. ‘Sure, the overall China rate may be the same, but what’s the suicide rate for young, employed workers employed by a technical company with bright prospects? I’ll bet it’s lower than the overall rate...’
Agreed. Also, I think what got the suicides in China in the news was that the victim attributed the suicide specifically to some weird policy or rule the company adhered to. It could be that the “normal” suicides at the company are being ignored, and the ones being reported are the suicides on top of this, justifying that concern that this is abnormal.
This was why I went looking for stats on suicides amongst university students. I remembered some talk when I was at Cambridge of a high suicide rate, which you might see as somewhat similarly counter-intuitive to a high suicide rate for ‘young, employed workers employed by a technical company with bright prospects’.
Actually, there are a number of reasons to expect a somewhat elevated suicide rate in a relatively high pressure environment where large numbers of young people have left home for the first time and are living in close proximity to large numbers of strangers their own age. Stories about high suicide rates at elite universities tend to take a very different tack to stories about Chinese workers however.
Wasn’t there a somewhat well-publicized “spate” of suicides at a large French telecom a while back? I remember the explanation being the same—the number observed was just about what you’d expect for an employer of that size.
ETA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_Telecom
Even if the suicide rate was somewhat higher than average it still doesn’t necessarily tell you much. You should really be looking at the probability of that number of suicides occurring in some distinct subset of the population—given all the subsets of a population that you can identify you will expect some to have higher than suicide rates than for the population as a whole. The relevant question is ‘what is the probability that you would observe this number of suicides by chance in some randomly selected subset of this size?’
Incidentally the rate appears to be below that of Cambridge University students:
Yes, this is my counter-counter-criticism as well. ‘Sure, the overall China rate may be the same, but what’s the suicide rate for young, employed workers employed by a technical company with bright prospects? I’ll bet it’s lower than the overall rate...’
Agreed. Also, I think what got the suicides in China in the news was that the victim attributed the suicide specifically to some weird policy or rule the company adhered to. It could be that the “normal” suicides at the company are being ignored, and the ones being reported are the suicides on top of this, justifying that concern that this is abnormal.
This was why I went looking for stats on suicides amongst university students. I remembered some talk when I was at Cambridge of a high suicide rate, which you might see as somewhat similarly counter-intuitive to a high suicide rate for ‘young, employed workers employed by a technical company with bright prospects’.
Actually, there are a number of reasons to expect a somewhat elevated suicide rate in a relatively high pressure environment where large numbers of young people have left home for the first time and are living in close proximity to large numbers of strangers their own age. Stories about high suicide rates at elite universities tend to take a very different tack to stories about Chinese workers however.