Epidemic Suicide in a Lahu Community: Converging Qualitative and Quantitative Methods

This article explores an epidemic of love-suicide in a Lahu community of southwest China in the 1950s. Suicide’s rarity and the methodological constraints of ethnographic fieldwork have severely hampered attempts to understand suicide cross-culturally. Using qualitative and quantitative research methods in a longitudinal fieldwork study provides insights regarding the patterns of suicide in a marginalized ethnic group. By developing a “retrospective survey” of suicide based on cluster sampling, this research demonstrates how to effectively incorporate a quantitative dimension in community-based fieldwork. This helps develop better ethnographic methods for documenting suicide and providing better data for cross-cultural comparison. (Suicide, China, ethnographic method, ethnic minority)