sarah masen
country music suicide
by ian on Mon Oct 04 05:23:10 +0000 2004 in Agrapha
this is from: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6144486/
“…Jim Gundlach of the University of Alabama said he got hate mail when he first published his study showing that people who listen to country music have higher rates of suicide.
He said it does not hold true any more.
“The country music that we have today is not the same kind of country music that was related to suicide back when we did this,” he said in a telephone interview.
“When we did that, there were songs like D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” he added. “It was predominantly tears in the beer types of music.”
Country music today is peppier, Gundlach said.
He said the findings, published in 1992, surprised him too.
“It was really kind of an accidental research project,” Gundlach, a sociologist, said. “We used all the standard predictors of suicide like marriage and I sorted the data so that cities with higher-than-expected rates would be at the top. There at the top was Nashville, Tennessee.”
His graduate statistics class said the common factor must be country music. One student who knew how to track down radio station play lists helped Gundlach and colleague Steven Stack discover that people who listened to more country music were indeed more likely to commit suicide."
and, interestingly, ulster also has one of the highest suicide rates in europe, AND lots of people really like country music. and that’s bang-up-to date. i think if they repeat the study they’d get the same result
