Official Statistics Flashcards
What type of data are official stats?
- Quantitative, secondary data
What are some practical advantages of using official stats?
- 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
What are some practical disadvantages of using official stats?
- 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
Theoretical differences between theories about official stats
- 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
Advantage of official stats - representativeness & stat to prove this
- Large scale and can cover the entire population
- ONS - latest census, in March 2021, covered 59.6 million people in England and Wales
How are stats reliable?
- They are repeated often
- ONS publishes quarterly statistics on crime levels and trends in England and Wales.
What are some practical issues with stats?
- 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
Ethical issues with official stats
- 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
Theoretical issues with stats
- 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
what are some practical issues of using stats to investigate education?
- saves time, government collects stats on over 30,000 primary and 40,000 secondary schools
- educational stats allow researchers to make comparions between class, ethnicity and gender
- educational stats are collected at regular intervals, can analyse trends and patterns over time eg; exam stats allow sociologists to see trends in the results
how are stats representative in terms of investigating education?
highly representative
for example, all state schools are required tol complete a school census three times a year that collects info about pupils attendance, ethnicity, numbers recieving fsm
how are stats reliable in terms of investigating education?
positivists favour stats because they can be used to test and re test hypothesis and discover cause and effect relationships
how are stats limited in terms of validity for investigating education?
may not be true to real life/explain why
schools may manipulate attendance figures by redefining poor attenders as being on study leave - schools aim to present themselves in the best possible light to maintain government funding and parental support
