Breaking down the question
The question has two linked parts. The first asks you to describe the characteristics of a social fact — a definitional task drawn straight from Durkheim's methodology. The second asks you to apply that concept to the suicide rate, showing how something apparently individual becomes, in aggregate, a social fact.
The examiner is testing both knowledge of the defining features — externality, constraint, generality — and the ability to connect Durkheim's methodological rules to his empirical study. Merely listing traits without linking them to suicide would answer only half the question.
At 10 marks, precision matters. You should name the characteristics clearly and then demonstrate, with Durkheim's own reasoning about suicide rates, why they qualify as social facts to be explained by other social facts.
How to approach it
Begin with Durkheim's definition of a social fact as a way of acting external to the individual and endowed with coercive power. Then set out its principal characteristics as distinct points so the examiner can award marks easily.
Move to the second part by explaining that the suicide rate, unlike an individual suicide, is stable, external and general across a society, and must be explained sociologically through integration and regulation rather than psychology. You can direct readers to our Durkheim notes and the social fact concept entry for elaboration.
Conclude by noting that this move — treating the rate as a social fact — founds sociology as an autonomous science with its own subject matter.
Model answer
For Emile Durkheim, a social fact is any way of acting, thinking or feeling that is external to the individual and exercises a coercive power over them. Social facts are the proper subject matter of sociology, and Durkheim insisted they be treated "as things" — observed objectively and explained by other social facts rather than by individual psychology or biology.
Several characteristics define a social fact. First is externality: social facts exist outside the individual consciousness, prior to and independent of any particular person, as with law, language, religion and moral rules that we are born into. Second is constraint: social facts exert pressure on individuals, and their coercive force is revealed when we try to resist them, in the form of sanctions ranging from legal punishment to social disapproval. Third is generality: a social fact is collective, diffused throughout a society and shared by its members rather than being peculiar to any one of them, though it exists independently of its individual manifestations. To these Durkheim added that social facts are best studied through indices such as legal codes, statistics and rates, and that they possess a reality of their own, rooted in the collective consciousness, that cannot be reduced to the individuals who compose society.
The suicide rate is Durkheim's classic demonstration that an apparently intensely personal act is, at the level of society, a social fact. He observed that while any single suicide may seem to spring from private despair, the rate of suicide in a given society remains remarkably stable over time and differs consistently between groups — higher among Protestants than Catholics, higher among the unmarried than the married, higher in times of crisis. This stability and regularity cannot be explained by the diverse individual motives of those who take their lives; something external and general must be at work. The rate is external to any individual, since no person authors it; it is constraining, expressing the state of the surrounding society; and it is general, characterising a collectivity as a whole. It is therefore a genuine social fact, to be explained by other social facts — above all the degrees of social integration and moral regulation. Durkheim's typology of egoistic, altruistic and anomic suicide traces variations in the rate to variations in how strongly individuals are bound to, and regulated by, their groups.
In conclusion, by showing that the suicide rate exhibits externality, constraint and generality, Durkheim established that even the most private of acts has a social dimension measurable at the collective level. This move both illustrated the characteristics of a social fact and vindicated his claim that sociology is an autonomous science with a distinct object of study.
Examiner's perspective
The examiner expects the two halves of the question to be genuinely connected, not answered in isolation. A frequent shortcoming is to list the characteristics of a social fact competently and then discuss suicide only descriptively, without showing why the rate specifically satisfies externality, constraint and generality.
Top answers define the social fact crisply, enumerate its features as distinct points, and then apply each feature to the suicide rate, using the stability of rates and inter-group differences as evidence. A brief mention of integration and regulation, and of Durkheim's larger aim of founding sociology as a science, signals command of the material within the 10-mark limit.