This paper draws on the results of an Inquiry, commissioned by Qualiti (Qualitative Research in the Social Sciences: Innovation, Integration and Impact), a node of ESRC's National Centre for Research Methods, into the physical and emotional harm suffered by qualitative social researchers. It argues that junior researchers and PhD students, the main recipients of such harm, are being let down by some principal investigators and PhD supervisors who are failing to manage researcher risks effectively. This record of the universities in researcher risk management compares poorly with the management of risks in cognate organisations, such as the management of risks to journalists in media organisations and of risks to fieldworkers in aid agencies. This deficiency in university risk management is arguably a matter of culture rather than deficient structures: an analogy is drawn with Mary Douglas's work on different cultural orientations to risk.

This paper's main aim is to argue the methodological case for a particular approach to researching the sociology of suicide. By way of illustrating the use of this approach it also offers some brief examples of substantive findings about the gendered character of men's suicides. The first half of the article explains and justifies the research approach. This is a qualitatively-driven mixed method and dual paradigm study of individual suicides. It is a sociological study which draws on the tradition of psychological autopsies of suicide; hence the term 'sociological autopsy'. The second half of the article offers brief illustrative findings from a specific research project which employed the sociological autopsy approach. This was a study of 100 suicide case files from a coroner's office in the UK. There is discussion of common sense assumptions about suicide in men; the construction of evidence in case files; a typology of gendered suicides where relationship breakdown seems to be the principal trigger; and the value of case-based analysis, with a single case discussed in some detail.

Young men are often considered to be at particular risk of suicide, but such claims are partial and potentially misleading. Drawing on official statistics and an innovative, qualitatively driven, mixed method sociological autopsy of individual suicides, the authors of this paper argue that the vulnerability of 'young' men to suicide is often exaggerated and that insufficient attention is paid to the diverse social circumstances of suicidal men and women across the life course. Detailed analysis of 100 case files selected from a single coroner's office in the UK reveals that patterns of suicide can be seen to map on to conventional features of a socially structured life course, with young people in crisis, mid-life gendered patterns of work and family and older people in decline. Particular attention is drawn to suicide among those in mid-life and to the role of the social bond, especially in the form of attachment. Relationship breakdown is considered in some detail because it is central to understanding the demography of suicide and the significance of social bonds.

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In keeping with recent critiques of literature on the body and the life course, the argument of this paper is that social identities can, to a certain extent, be constructed post-mortem and in the absence of a living body. The authors make this case with reference to a sociological autopsy study of a hundred suicide case files in a coroner's office in a medium-sized British city. The research draws on ethnographic approaches to the study of documents. There is discussion of some of the diverse artefacts in the coroners' files: medical reports, witness statements and suicide notes. The identity work revealed in these sources is as much about the living as the dead and is especially bound up in the process of avoiding blame. This paper argues that the files assembled by coroners in the course of an inquest provide insights into the creation of social identities in contemporary Britain. 1 Drawing on ethnographic studies of documents (Riles, 2006a) and on recent critiques of literature on the body and the life course (Hallam, Hockey and Howarth, 1999;Hockey and Draper, 2005) we suggest that the files contribute to the constitution of different kinds of persons. Our argument is based on the analysis of one hundred inquest files returning a verdict of suicide at a coroner's office in a medium-sized British city.In England and Wales, inquests are held by coroners to establish the cause and category of a sudden or unexplained death and until completed no final certificate of death can be issued. This official inquiry into the causes and circumstances of the death creates a space in which social identities are scrutinized, redefined and challenged, and involves the acquisition of new identities beyond the life course (Hockey and Draper, 2005). A conception of personhood as beginning before birth and extending after death presupposes a relational approach, wherein personhood is not possessed, but is generated and performed through interactions with other agents, human and nonhuman, alive and dead (Strathern, 1992). In relation to the deceased in the context of suicide inquests, such a distributive understanding of personhood The Sociological Review, 56:2 (2008)