Observation, Official Statistics And Documents Flashcards
What are the 6 types of observation?
Participant Non-participant Overt Covert Strucutured Unstructured
What are the advantages of participant observation?
Validity due to its authenticity and naturalistic approach
Ability to study closed groups
Flexible research opportunity
What are the disadvantages of participant observation?
Unreliable and unrepresentative
Lack of validity
Ethical issues
Getting in, staying in, getting out.
What are the advantages of structured observation?
Reliability
Ability to compare data
What are the disadvantages of structured observations?
Loss of validity
Only useful studying small-scale interactions.
What are official statistics?
Quantitative data collected by government bodies.
What are hard statistics?
Simple counts that register events, such as births and deaths, they can’t be easily manipulated.
What are soft statistics?
Statistics which can be manipulated easily, e.g. Crime statistics.
What are the advantages of official statistics?
Availability Representativeness Cost Comparability Reliability
What are the issues with official statistics?
Reliability due to households which may be missed out
Political bias
Male bias
What are documents?
Secondary data created by individuals, groups and oragnisations.
What are the two types of documents?
Personal documents
Public documents
What are the advantages of personal documents?
Mainly written for personal purposes and often have a high degree of validity.
Many personal document are cheap and save the researcher time.
What are the disadvantages of personal documents?
Some documents are made after the event and may miss some information.
Illiterate groups are unlikely to produce documents such as letters and diaries.
