Secondary methods

Question 1

What are the types of secondary data?

Answer 1

-documents
-official statistics
-mass media

Question 2

What are official statistics?

Answer 2

-produced by local gov,central gov and agencies i.e police

Hard Stats: can’t be manipulated e.g birth, deaths

Soft stats: can be manipulated e.g poverty, crime , unemployment

Question 3

What are documents?

Answer 3

this is any written record or text.they can be formal or informal

Question 4

What are examples of personal documents?

Answer 4

-letters
-diaries
-autobiographies
-memoirs
-suicide notes
e.g durkheim

Question 5

What are examples of official documents?

Answer 5

-school records
-government records
-social work records
-census records
e.g hudson and bramhall

Question 6

What is the mass media’s role in secondary research?

Answer 6

Has a wide demographic reach
includes: Newspapers (broadsheet and tabloid), tv news, radio and the internet
e.g fawbert hoodies, Archer Riot Grrls

Question 7

What are the advantages of secondary data?

Answer 7

-can be used to see if patterns and trends have changed over time

-we can see how social behaviour changes after certain events or societal change

-international comparrisons can be made between countries

-greater sample is collected

Question 8

Disadvantages of secondary methods?

Answer 8

-the catagories used by offical stats may not corrospond to what the sociologist is interested in

-data collection can’t be controlled and may change over time, can’t always detect patterns and trends

-can’t explain why something is happening