Abstract
It is necessary that lay people impute or ascribe ‘vocabularies of motive’ to the sudden death represented for categorizing as suicide. However, researchers turned away from this issue after Durkheim denied the validity of such investigation in his Suicide. In contrast, Douglas, who sharply criticized Durkheim’s Suicide, has proposed an alternative program for studying motivations of suicide. Nevertheless, his program has had some fatal issues; it has only respected and studied victims’ inner motivations to suicide while neglecting difficult issues association with ‘emotionalism’. In contrast, Atkinson’s program using proto-membership categorization analysis for imputing or ascribing vocabularies of motive to suicide has produced an enormous stride in understanding. Future studies seeking to impute or ascribe vocabularies of motive to suicide should follow membership categorization analysis especially the concept of ‘predicates’.
