Official Statistics

Question 1

Describe official statistics

Answer 1

• Quantitative data collected by government or other official bodies
• e.g. birth rates, death rates, marriages, the ten-yearly Census
• Government collects official statistics to use in policy making, e.g. statistics on birth help the government to plan the number of schools places

Question 2

What are the ways of collecting official statistics?

Answer 2

• Registration (e.g. law requires parent to register births
• Official surveys (e.g. Census)
• Administrative records of state agencies (e.g. hospitals, courts, schools)

Question 3

What are ‘non-official’ statistics?

Answer 3

• Non-state organisation (e.g. charities and trade unions) produce ‘non-official’ statistics
• e.g. churches produce membership and attendance statistics, while the charity Shelter produces statistics on homelessness

Question 4

Describe practical advantages of official statistics

Answer 4

• They’re a free source of huge amounts of data. Only the state can afford to conduct large-scale surveys costing millions, e.g. the Census covering every household in the UK.
• The government has the power to compel citizens to provide it with information, e.g. by requiring parents to register births and heads of households must complete the Census form. This reduces the problem of non-response e.g. in 2021 the Census refusal rate was about 3%. So, using this data will save time and money
• Statistics allow comparisons between groups, e.g. we can compare statistics on education achievement statistics on educational achievement or crime rates between classes, gender or ethnic groups
• As official statistics are collected at regular intervals they show patterns and trend over time, meaning sociologists can use them for ‘before and after’ studies to show cause and effect relationships

Question 5

Describe practical disadvantages of official statistics

Answer 5

• The government collects statistics for their own purpose and not for sociologists, so there may be none available for certain topics. e.g. In Durkheim’s suicide study, he found no statistics specifically on the religion of suicide victims, presumable because the state had no use for this information.
• The definitions that the state uses in collecting data may be different from sociological terms. e.g. they may define ‘poverty’ differently, which leads to different views on how large a problem is
• Definitions may change over time, which makes comparisons difficult. e.g. the official definition of unemployment changed over 30 times during the 1980s and early 1990s, so the unemployment statistics can’t be used for ‘before and after’ studies

Question 6

Describe representativeness advantages of official statistics for positivists

Answer 6

As official statistics often cover large numbers (may be a whole population) and care is taken with sampling procedures, they often provide a more representative sample than studies conducted by a sociologists with limited resources. They can then provide a better basis for making generalisations and testing hypothesis

Question 7

Describe potential representativeness disadvantages of official statistics

Answer 7

• Statistics produced from official survey, e.g. the British Crime Survey, may be less representative as they’re only based on a sample of the relevant population.
• Nonetheless, official surveys are still bigger than what sociologists could carry out. e.g. the Crime survey for England and Wales in 2014 had a sample size of 50,000

Question 8

Describe reliability advantages of official statistics for positivists

Answer 8

• Official statistics are seen as reliable as they’re complied in a standardised way by trained staff, following a set of procedures which can be easily replicated. e.g. government statisticians compile death rates for different social classes following a standard procedure that uses the occupation recorded on each person’s death certificate to identify their class
• This is also particularly true for statistics created from official surveys, e.g. the Census. The survey is carried out using a standardised meaning instrument (a written questionnaire of an interview schedules) which is administered in the same way to all respondents. Therefore any researcher could repeat the survey and get the same results

Question 9

Why do interpretivists reject statistics?

Answer 9

• Interpretivists, like Cicourel, reject the positivists claim that official statistics are real and objective. In their view, statistics are social constructs that represent the labels attached to people. So interpretivist want to investigate the social processes, like labelling and stereotyping, by which official statistics are constructed
• e.g. In Durkheim’s case study of suicides, it could be argued that suicide rates were simply a record of the number of decisions by coroners to label some deaths as suicides
• Statistics are invalid and merely the total number of decision made by officials

Question 10

Describe soft statistics

Answer 10

• They’re statistics that can be changed based on categories which give a less valid picture as they’re often compiled from the administrative records created by state agencies
• Represent decisions made by these agencies and neglect an unknown (‘dark figure’) of unrecorded cases

Question 11

Describe hard statistics

Answer 11

• They provide a more valid picture e.g. birth and death rates. This is because they’re usually recorded by the government so a small number goes unrecorded
• As there’s little dispute on categories used to collect data and they’re created from registration data

Question 12

What are Marxists view on official statistics?

Answer 12

• Official statistics serve the interests of capitalism
• In class inequality, the state serves the interests of the capitalist class. Statistics that the state creates are part of what Althusser terms as the ideological state apparatus, using ideology to serve capitalism
• So, statistics distort reality and maintain the capitalist class in power

Question 13

How do official statistics perform ideological functions according to Marxists?

Answer 13

• Politically sensitive data that would reveal the exploitative nature of capitalism may not be published. e.g. since the 1980s, data from the Census no longer includes class differences in death rates
• The definitions used in created official statistics conceal the true reality of capitalism. e.g. the state has often changed the definition of unemployment, and this had reduced the numbers of officially defies as unemployed. This disguises the true level of unemployment and its damaging effects on the working class

Question 14

What are feminists views on official statistics?

Answer 14

Feminists like Oakley and Graham reject quantitative survey methods as they’re a patriarchal model of research. Since statistics are created using these methods, statistics also patriarchal

Question 15

How are official statistics patriarchal according to feminists?

Answer 15

• As official statistics are created by the state, which maintains patriarchal oppression, they serve to conceal to gender inequality and maintain women’s subordinations.
• e.g. there’s wealth statistics on paid employment outside the home, but few statistics are collected on women’s unpaid domestic labour, which underestimates women’s economic contributions in society

Question 16

How has there been attempts for officials statistics

Answer 16

• Changes in definitions used in statistics that reveal women’s positions more clearly. e.g. a family’s class used to be determined by the occupation of the man in the house. But in 2001, this changed to person who owns/rents the house, and if it was jointly owned it would be the person with the highest income.
• These changes increase the changes that a women’s occupation will determine his family’s class
• However, men are more likely to be the homeowner and earn more. So statistics still give a distorted picture of gender equality