Official Statistics

Question 1

What type of data are official stats?

Answer 1

• Quantitative, seconday data

Question 2

What are some practical advantages of using official stats?

Answer 2

• Allow us to make comparisons between groups (census covers whole UK population at the same time) This makes it easy to compare social groups, religions
• They’re collected at regular intervals, so they show trends and patterns over time
• Sociologists can use them for ‘before and after’ studies
• Identify corrolations between variables

Question 3

What are some practical disadvantages of using official stats?

Answer 3

• Government creates stats for their own purpose, not for sociologists to study - may not be any on the topic they’re interested in
• The state might change the definitions it uses over time & different states might define the same term differently - this makes comparisons over time or between different countries difficult
• Some stats are collected infrequently - do not always give an up to date picture of social trends

Question 4

Theoretical differences between theories about official stats

Answer 4

• Positivsts - favour official stats, see them as objective facts about society
• Interpretevism - see them as social constructs
• Marxists & feminists - see them as performing an ideological function

Question 5

Advantage of official stats - representativeness & stat to prove this

Answer 5

• Large scale and can cover the entire population
• ONS - latest census, in March 2021, covered 59.6 million people in England and Wales

Question 6

How are stats reliable?

Answer 6

• They are repeated often
• ONS publishes quarterly statistics on crime levels and trends in England and Wales.

Question 7

What are some practical issues with stats?

Answer 7

• Time - The amounts of statistical data can take time to interpret
• Operationalising variables - Statistical measurements have finite criteria for what defines ethnicty, class, gender which may be less fluid than contemporary society

Question 8

Ethical issues with official stats

Answer 8

• Official statistics are often compiled from data that individuals provide without explicitly consenting for sociological research (e.g., data from tax returns, hospital records, without the direct permission of participants
• Although official statistics are anonymized, they might still reveal sensitive information, especially when dealing with small groups or local areas. This breaches the ethical principle of protecting participants’ identities

Question 9

Theoretical issues with stats

Answer 9

• Validity - Interpretevists would suggest that stats are a social construction as it is up to those in power to decide what actions or behaviours fit definitions (so behaviours of different classes/ethnicities may be viewed more negatively)
• Dark figure - some actions or behaviours are not recorded/accounted for in stats. Crime survey for England & Wales - only 4 in 10 crimes are actually reported to the police