Official Statistics

Question 1

What are official statistics

Answer 1

Quantitative data gathered by the government or other official bodies. They are collected for policy making. Ofsted use stats to monitor the effectiveness of schools and colleges.

Question 2

What are the two ways of collecting official stats

Answer 2

Registered- law requires parents to register births
Official surveys- census or the general household survey

Question 3

What is a disadvantage and an advantage of official stats

Answer 3

They are secondary data

Question 4

Practical advantages of official stats

Answer 4

A free source with huge amounts of data, allow comparisons between groups, compare achievement with age and gender. They are collected at regular intervals and show patterns and trends over time.

Question 5

What can the state conduct that sociologists can’t when it comes to official stats

Answer 5

Only the state can afford to conduct large scale surveys costing millions of pounds such as the census covering every household in the UK.

Question 6

Practical disadvantages of official stats

Answer 6

Government stats may not cater for sociologists interests. Definitions that the state uses in collecting the data may be different from what that sociologist would use and the definitions change over time making it hard to compare findings.

Question 7

Representativeness of official statistics

Answer 7

Official statistics cover very large numbers, so can provide a better basis for making generalisations. However some are less representative than others because some are compulsory.

Question 8

Reliability and official stats

Answer 8

They are compiled in a standardised way by train staff. They could compile death rate with different social class. any person properly trained will allocate given case to the same category. However coders may make errors, and surveys may be filled out wrong.

Question 9

Validity and official stats

Answer 9

Hard and soft statistics.
Hard stats include birth rates and death rates which tend to be accurate
Soft stats are much less valid and can include criminal acts, not all crimes are reported and recorded.

Question 10

Improvements to validity in police statistics
Official statistics

Answer 10

Attempts have been made to compensate for shortcoming of police statistics by using self report of victim studies eg. Crime survey
By comparing the results with the police statistics, we can see the latter underestimate the “real rate” of crime.

Question 11

Positivists and official statistics
Durkheim

Answer 11

Favour stats as they consist of social facts. they develop hypothesis to discover the cause of the behaviour patterns. Positivists often use official stats to test their hypothesis. Eg Durkheim tested hypothesis that suicide is causes by lack of integration.

Question 12

Interprevists and official statistics
Maxwell Atkinson

Answer 12

Argue that statistics do not represent real things or social facts, and are socially constructed. Atkinson uses qualitative methods to discover how coroners reached their decision to label deaths as suicides rather than how many were labelled as suicide.

Question 13

Marxism and official stats
John Irvine

Answer 13

They see statistics, as serving the interest of capitalism. Statistic that are produced part of ruling class, ideology and a part of the ideas and values that help maintain capitalist class and power. Eg unemployment definition has changed regularly

Question 14

Documents
Official stats

Answer 14

Refers to any written text such as personal diaries, government reports, medical records, newspapers, letters, emails and bank statements and also can include paintings, photographs, radio and films.

Question 15

Public documents
Official stats

Answer 15

Produced by organisations, such as government, department, schools and welfare agencies. Some of the output is available for researchers which includes ofsted reports. Public documents also include, eg. Black report.

Question 16

Personal documents
Official stats

Answer 16

Include letters and diaries, photo albums and autobiographies. They are first person accounts of social events and personal experiences. They are used to reveal meanings to individual experiences.

Question 17

Study of using personal documents
William Thomas and Florian Znaneicki
Official stats

Answer 17

It was a study of migration and social change. They were interested in peoples personal experiences, the documents included 764 letters of the migrants experience. They were able to explore the experiences of social change of people who migrated to US

Question 18

Historical documents
Official stats

Answer 18

Personal or public documents created in the past. the study of families and households can be studied using historical documents.

Question 19

Peter Laslett and historical documents
Official stats

Answer 19

Used Parish records in the study of family structure in the pre-industrial England.

Question 20

Michael Anderson and historic documents
Official statistics

Answer 20

Use parliamentary reports on child labour as well as statistical material from 1851 census to study changes in family structure in the 19th century Preston.

Question 21

Assessing documents
John Scott 1990
Official stats

Answer 21

He argues that when it comes to assessing documentary sources, the principles are the same as those for any other type of sociological evidence. He puts forward criteria authenticity, credibility, representativeness and meaning.

Question 22

Authenticity and assessing documents

Answer 22

Is the document will it claims to be are there any missing pages and is it free of errors who wrote the document?
Eg. The Hitler diaries were late proven to be fake.

Question 23

Credibility and assessing documents

Answer 23

Is the document believable? politicians may write diaries intended for publication that inflate their own importance. Thomas and Znaniecki suggested that the immigrants may have lied in their letters about how good life was in USA to justify their decision to immigrate.

Question 24

Representativeness and assessing documents 

Answer 24

Is the evidence in the document typical. Not all documents survive and are the surviving documents. Typical of the ones that get destroyed not all surviving documents are available for researchers to use. Some groups may be unrepresented.

Question 25

Meaning and assessing documents

Answer 25

The research and may need special skills to understand a document, and it may have to be translated from foreign language. We have to interpret what the document actually means to the writer and the intended audience.

Question 26

Advantages of documents
Official stats

Answer 26

Personal documents enable the researcher to get close to the social actors reality. Sometimes documents are the only source of information and offer an extra check on results of obtained by primary methods and they’re cheap.

Question 27

Content analysis
Official statistics

Answer 27

It is a method for dealing systematically with contents of documents. It is known for its use in analysing documents produced by the mass media such as television, new bulletins or advertisements.

Question 28

Ros gill and content analysis

Answer 28

Describes how content analysis works.
First, we decide what categories we will use next we study the source. Then we count up the number in each category. we might then compare the results of a content analysis with official statistics.

Question 29

Ros gill and content analysis example

Answer 29

If we wanted to measure aspects of how female characters are betrayed as being in paid employment, we decide categories like employment, full-time housewife, then we study television and magazine articles. Then compare how often women of a trade as full-time housewives.

Question 30

Glenys Lobban and content analysis

Answer 30

Used content analysis to analyse gender roles in children’s reading schemes and found females or betrayed in a range of roles that was limited and stereotyped.

Question 31

Advantages of content analysis

Answer 31

It is cheap and easy to find sources of material in the form of newspapers and television broadcasts and positivists see it as a useful source of objective, quantitative, scientific data.

Question 32

Using secondary sources to investigate education
Practical issues

Answer 32

Saves time and money, they enable socialigists to make comparisons. Stats are collected at regular intervals stats are used to monitor effectiveness