Country Music and Suicide--Individual, Indirect, and Interaction Effects: A Reply to Snipes and Maguire.

OLD-time music; RADIO & music; COUNTRY music; SUICIDE; AUTHORS; BIO-bibliography; PSYCHOLOGY

This article responds to sociologists Jeffrey B. Snipes and Edward R. Maguire's criticism of the authors' study on the relationship between country music air time and suicide rate among whites in the U.S. There is some confusion over the Radio and Records data on country music. Radio and Records publishes its Rating Report and Directory between two and three times annually. Estimates of country market shares are available for at least the spring and fall of each year. Researchers seem to have the impression that just one estimate is available for each year. This is not the case. There are problems, however, in obtaining these data including the fact that the publication of these estimates is staggered. Also, few libraries subscribe to the series and those that do typically discard old issues such as those giving 1985 estimates. To address the issue of possible spuriousness authors replicated their model substituting the mean annual country music market shire for 1985 as the measure of country music. They find that the significant zero-order relationship between country music and white suicide is no longer significant in this model. The idea, however, that country music has no effect on white urban suicide may be premature.