A Descriptive Analysis Of Factors Influencing Nunavut People’s High Suicide Rate:2001-2011

Suicide existed even in history in the area of what is called Nunavut today; however, people who committed suicide were the sick and the old. They did not want to make themselves the burden of others; thus for them suicide was a way to make contributions to their families and their societies. Besides, in many situations, these old and sick people had discussed with and were even assisted by their relatives in the process of making suicide.By contrast, in the last few decades, things began to change. The suicide rate has increased dramatically. What is more, a very distinctive feature of Nunavut people’s suicide behavior is that young people constitute the largest proportion of those deaths. Although both federal and territorial governments have attached great importance to this issue, the situation has not been improved. This research, based on the analysis of related data from2001to2011, tries to explore and analyze fundamental causes for the high suicide rate in the territory of Nunavut. This research can not only help people more clearly understand the serious suicide situation in Nunavut, but also provide experience for other regions with high suicide rate.Current researches mainly explore causes for Nunavut’s high suicide from macro or micro perspectives. Analysis from a macro perspective tries to make suicide conditions of the whole society as their research object, and gets the conclusion that only social elements are powerful enough to exert their influence on the suicide rate of a certain society or group. By comparison, analysis from a micro perspective narrows down the scale of their research object, making individuals’suicide behavior as their research target. Scholars of this school try to take more influencing factors into consideration and put emphasis on individual varieties. The recently springing-up strain theory, from both macro and micro perspectives, tries to more comprehensively study sources of suicide behaviors. Although recent years have witnessed more studies concerning suicide issue, suicide studies specifically targeted the territory of Nunavut are nearly a blank domain at present. Because of this blankness, scholars tend to link common problems to the high suicide rate in Nunavut, yet they are more likely to focus on broad problems such as power relations and political conditions, which can not be solved in a short period. To make up this shortcoming, this thesis, making Nunavut’s suicide rate as the research target, tries to make a descriptive analysis of how more specific social influencing factors play their roles, which is more practically significant for solutions to this issue.This research, guided by strain theory and based on news reports, oral documents and interviews from previous studies, tries to make a descriptive analysis of social influencing factors for Nunavut’s suicide rate. The author refines the four sources of "strain" put forward by strain theory---value conflict, conflicts between ideal and reality, relative depravity, lack of skills to tackle crisis---to four categories of social factors:education and employment, social relationship, social problems, tradition and culture. Then more detailed indicators for each category are selected to further specify them. These indicators include graduation rate; the proportion of the employees accounting for the total population; the proportion of people in single, the proportion of children living in lone-parent families; homicide rate, crime severity index; the proportion of Nunavut people with knowledge of official languages. When these indicators are specific enough, Nunavut’s correspondent data from2001to2011are employed to prove whether they are closely connected with suicide conditions. The final conclusion is that these four categories do make joint contributions to the high suicide rate there.