It was the second methodological study of a social fact in the context of society (it was preceded by a sociological study by a Czech author, later the president of Czechoslovakia: Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Der Selbstmord als soziale Massenerscheinung der Gegenwart, 1881, Czech 1904).

[2] Durkheim noted the effects of various crises on social aggregates—war, for example, leading to an increase in altruism, economic boom or disaster contributing to anomie.

[2] As individual interest would not be considered important, Durkheim stated that in an altruistic society there would be little reason for people to die by suicide.

[6] It is the product of moral deregulation and a lack of definition of legitimate aspirations through a restraining social ethic, which could impose meaning and order on the individual conscience.

Fatalistic suicide occurs when a person is excessively regulated, when their futures are pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by oppressive discipline.

This type of inference, which explains particular events (the "micro") in terms of statistical data (the "macro"), is often misleading, as Simpson's paradox shows.

Van Poppel and Day (1996) argue that differences in reported suicide rates between Catholics and Protestants could be explained entirely in terms of how these two groups record deaths.

Indeed, later researchers found that the Protestant–Catholic differences in suicide seemed to be limited to German-speaking Europe, thus suggesting a need to account for other contributing factors.

[25] Despite its limitations, Durkheim's work on suicide has influenced proponents of control theory, and is often mentioned[26] as a classic sociological study.