Official Statistics Flashcards
What are official statistics
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.
What are the two ways of collecting official stats
Registered- law requires parents to register births
Official surveys- census or the general household survey
What is a disadvantage and an advantage of official stats
They are secondary data
Practical advantages of official stats
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.
What can the state conduct that sociologists can’t when it comes to official stats
Only the state can afford to conduct large scale surveys costing millions of pounds such as the census covering every household in the UK.
Practical disadvantages of official stats
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.
Representativeness of official statistics
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.
Reliability and official stats
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.
Validity and official stats
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.
Improvements to validity in police statistics
Official statistics
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.
Positivists and official statistics
Durkheim
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.
Interprevists and official statistics
Maxwell Atkinson
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.
Marxism and official stats
John Irvine
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
Documents
Official stats
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.
Public documents
Official stats
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.
Personal documents
Official stats
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.
Study of using personal documents
William Thomas and Florian Znaneicki
Official stats
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
Historical documents
Official stats
Personal or public documents created in the past. the study of families and households can be studied using historical documents.
Peter Laslett and historical documents
Official stats
Used Parish records in the study of family structure in the pre-industrial England.
Michael Anderson and historic documents
Official statistics
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.
Assessing documents
John Scott 1990
Official stats
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.
Authenticity and assessing documents
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.
Credibility and assessing documents
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.
Representativeness and assessing documents 
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.
Meaning and assessing documents
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.
Advantages of documents
Official stats
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.
Content analysis
Official statistics
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.
Ros gill and content analysis
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.
Ros gill and content analysis example
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.
Glenys Lobban and content analysis
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.
Advantages of content analysis
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.
Using secondary sources to investigate education
Practical issues
Saves time and money, they enable socialigists to make comparisons. Stats are collected at regular intervals stats are used to monitor effectiveness
