2.1 RM - Official Statistics Flashcards
What are official statistics?
A form of quantitative secondary data produced by official bodies such as the government
What are some practical strengths of official stats?
- quick and easy
- no personal risk
- can be collected overtime to see change
- patterns and correlations - positivists like
What are some practical weaknesses of official stats?
- lack depth - quantitative making them disliked by interpretivists
- government definitions differ from sociologists e.g. Poverty
What are ethical strengths of official stats?
Few ethical issues
What is an ethical weakness of official stats?
Can cause harm e.g publishing correlation between ethnicity and school exclusions could lead to racist labelling of students
What are some reliable strengths of official stats?
Hard stats are easy to collect and gather in same standardised way
What are hard stats?
Data with no grey area e.g births, deaths, marriages
What are reliable weaknesses of official stats?
Soft stats have a grey area difficult to collect data on them
What are soft stats?
Data with a grey area e.g suicide, bullying, unemployment
What are representative strengths of official stats?
- Large samples mean they are more likely to be representative e.g census covers whole country
- Positivists large scale official stats allow for patterns and generalisations
What is a representative weakness of official stats?
Dark figure - Unknown amounts of unemployment or suicide not represented in the stats
What are validity strengths of official stats?
- simple factual data
- objective and detached positivists like them
- allow for testing of hypothesis and cause and effect relationships to be found
What are validity weaknesses of official stats?
- dark figure affects validity not a real picture
- lack depth can’t develop verstehen - interpretivists
- stats are socially constructed
