Secondary Sources

Question 1

What is secondary data

Answer 1

Secondary data is therefore data gathered or produced by other people for their own particular purpose, but which sociologists make use of in their research

Question 2

What are the two main sources of secondary data

Answer 2

• official statistics
• documents

Question 3

Official statistics

Answer 3

• are quantitative data gathered by the government or other official bodies. E.g, statistics on births, deaths, marriages and divorces, exam results, school exclusions, crime, suicide, unemployment and health.
• the ten yearly census of the whole uk population is a major source of official statistics.
• the government collect official statistics to use in policy making. E.g, statistics on births help the government to plan the number of school places for the future. Similarly ofstead and the department for education use statistics on things such as exam results to monitor the effectiveness of schools and colleges

Question 4

What are the two ways of collecting official statistics

Answer 4

• registration - e.g, the law requires parents to register births
• official surveys - such as the census or the general household survey

Question 5

Advantages and disadvantages of official statistics

Answer 5

• both the advantages and disadvantages of official statistics stem largely from the fact that they are secondary data - they are not collected by sociologists but by official agencies for their own particular purposes - which may not always be the same as those of sociologists

Question 6

Practical advantages of official statistics

Answer 6

• they are a free source of human amounts of data. Only the state can afford to conduct large scale surveys costing millions of pounds, such as the census covering every household in the uk. Only the government has the power to compel citizens to provide it with information, e.g, by requiring parents to register births. Sociologists can make use of this data saving them time and money
• statistics allow comparisons between groups. E.g, we can compare statistics on educational achievement, crime rates or life expectancy between classes, genders or ethnic groups
• because official statistics are collected at regular intervals they show trends and patterns over time. This means sociologists can use them for ‘before and after’ studies to show cause and effect relationships. E.g, we can compare divorce statistics before and after a change in the divorce law to measure what effect the new legislation has had on

Question 7

Practical disadvantages of official statistics

Answer 7

• the government collects statistics for is own purpose and not for the benefit of sociologists, so there may be none available on the topic we are interested in. E.g, Durkheim in his study of suicide found that there were no statistics specifically on the religion of suicide victims, presumably because the state had no use for the information. However, this is crucial to Durkheims hypothesis about integration and suicide
• the definitions that the state uses in collecting the data may be different from those that sociologists would use. E.g, they may define ‘poverty’ or ‘truancy’ differently. In turn, this may lead to different views of how large the problem is
• if definitions change over time, it may make comparisons difficult. E.g, the official definition of unemployment changed over 30 times during the 1980s and early 1990s - so the unemployment statistics are not comparing like with like

Question 8

Representativeness of official statistics

Answer 8

• because official statistics often cover very large numbers, and because care is taken with sampling procedures, they often provide a more representative sample than surveys conducted with the limited resources available to the sociologist. They may therefore provide a better basis for making generalisations and testing hypotheses
• however, some statistics are less representative than others. E.g, statistics gathered by compulsory registration, such as birth and death statistics or the number of pupils in schools, are likely to cover virtually all cases and therefore be highly representative
• in contrast, statistics produced from official surveys, such as the British crime survey or the general house survey, may be less representative because they are only bases on a sample of the relevant population. Such official surveys are usually much bigger than most sociologist could carry out themsleves. E.g, the crime survey for England and Wales in 2014 had a sample size of 50,000 people

Question 9

Relatability of official statistics

Answer 9

• official statistics are generally seen as a reliable source of data. They are compiled in a standardised way by trained staff, following set procedures. E.g, government statisticians compile death rates for different social classes following a standard procedure that uses the occupation recorded on each person death certificate to identify their class
• official statistics are therefore reliable because, in principle any person properly trained will allocate a given case to the same category
• however, official statistics are not always reliable. E.g, census coders may male errors or omit information when recording data from census forms, or meters of the public may fill in the form incorrectly

Question 10

Validity: ‘the dark figure’ - official statistics

Answer 10

• a major problem with using official statistics is that of validity - do they actually measure the thing that they claim to?
• hard and sift statistics - some ‘hard’ official statistics do succeed in doing this. E.g, statistics on the number of births, deaths, marriages and divorces generally give a very accurate picture of
• however, ‘soft’ statistics give a much less valid picture. E.g, police statistics do not record all crimes. Similarly, educational statistics do not record all racist incidents occurring in schools
• attempts have been made to compensate for the shortcomings of police statistics by using self report or victim studies to give a more accurate picture of the amount of crime. E.g, the crime survey for England and Wales asks people what cries they have been victims of
• by comparing the results with the police statistics, we can see that the latter underestimate the ‘real rate’ of crime and from this we can male a more accurate estimate of the extent of crime.

Question 11

Official statistics: facts, constructs or ideology?

Answer 11

• positivism
• interpretivism
• Marxists

Question 12

Positivism - official statistics

Answer 12

• positivists such as Durkheim see statistics as a valuable resource for sociologists. Positivists take for granted that official statistics are ‘social facts’; that is, true and objective measures of the real rate of crime, suicide etc. they see sociology as a science and, just like natural scientists, they develop hypotheses to discover the causes of the behaviour patterns that the statistics reveal
• positivists often use official statistics to test their hypotheses. E.g, Durkheim put forward the hypothesis that suicide is cause by a lack of social integration.
• comparative method, he argues rear rage Protestant and catholic religions differ in how well they integrate individuals into society. Using official suicide statistics, he was able to show that Protestants had a higher suicide rate than catholics, and so was unable to argue that this statistical evidence proved his hypothesis correct

Question 13

Interpretivism - official statistics

Answer 13

• by contrast, interprevsit such as Atkinson regarded official statistics as lacking validity. They argue that statistics do not represent real things or ‘social facts’ that exist out there in the world. Instead statistics are socially constructed - they merely represent the labels some people give to the behaviour of others
• in this view, suicide statistics do not represent the ‘real rate’ of suicide that have actually taken place, but merely the total number of decision made by corners to label some deaths as sucides. The statistics therefore tell us more about thw way coroners label deaths than about the actual causes of these deaths
• rather than taking statistics at face value, therefore interprevists argue that we should investigate how they are socially constructed. E.g, Atkinson uses qualitative methods such as observing the proceedings of coroners courts to discover how coroners reach their decisions to label some deaths as suicides, others as accidents and so on

Question 14

Marxism - official statistics

Answer 14

• Marxist such as Irvine take a different view. Unlike interprevists, they do not regard official statistics as merely the outcome of the labels applied by official statistics such as coroners. Instead they see official statistics as serving the interests of capitalism
• Marxists see capitalist society as made up of two social classes in conflict with each other, the capitalist ruling class and the working class, whose labour the capitalist exploit for profit
• in this conflict, the state is not neutral, but serves the interest of the capitalist class. The statistics that the state produces are part of ruling class ideology - that is, a part of the ideas and values that help to maintain the capitalist class in power
• unemployment statistics are a good example of this process the state has regularly changed the definition of unemployment over the years. This has almost always reduced the numbers officially defined as unemployed, thus disguising the true level of unemployment and its damaging effects on the working class

Question 15

Documents

Answer 15

• ‘documnet’ refers to an written text, such as personal diaries, government reports, medical records, novels, newspapers, letters, emails, blogs, web pages etc.
• in fact, we can also take them term to include ‘texts’ such as paintings, drawings, photographs, maps and so on. We also include sounds and images from films, television, radio and other media output
• distinguish between public and personal documents:

Question 16

Public documents

Answer 16

• public documents are produced by organisations such as government departments, schools, welfare agencies, businesses and charities. Some of this output may be available for researchers to use. It includes documents such as ofsted reports of school inspections, minutes of council meetings, published company accounts and records of parliamentary
• public documents also included the official reports of public enquires such as the black report into inequalities in health, which became a major source of information for sociologists

Question 17

Personal documents

Answer 17

• personal documents include items such as letters, diaries, photo albums and autobiographies. These are first person accounts of social events and personal experiences, and they generally also include the writers feelings and attitudes

Question 18

Historical documents

Answer 18

• a historical document is simply a personal or public document created in the past. If we want to study the past, historical documents are usually the only source of information
• the study of families and households illustrates some of the types of historical documents have been used:
• laslett used parish records in his study of family structure in pre industrial England
• micheal Anderson used parliamentary reports on child labour, as well as statistical material from the 1851 census, to study changes in family structure in 19th century Preston

Question 19

Assessing documents

Answer 19

• as Scott argues, when it comes to assessing documentary sources, the general principles are the same as those for ant other type of sociological evidence. He puts forward four critea for evaluating documents: authenticity, credibility, representatives and meaning

Question 20

1. Authenticity

Answer 20

• is the document what it claims to be? Are there any missing pages, and if it is a copy, is it free from any errors? Who actually write the document?
• e.g, the so called ‘hitler diaries’ were later proven to be fakes

Question 21

2. Credibility

Answer 21

• is the document believable? Was the author sincere? Politicians may write diaries intended for publication that inflate their own importance.
• thomas and znanieckis polish immigrants may have lied in their letters home about how goos life in the USA was, to justify their decision to emigrate
• is the document accurate? E.g, was the account of a riot written soon after the event, or years later?
• Stuart stein notes that documents on the internet are often not checked for accuracy before publication

Question 22

3. Representativeness

Answer 22

• is the evidences in the document typical? If we cannot answer this question, we cannot know whether it is safe to generalise from it:
• not all document survive: are the surviving documents typical of the ones that get destroyed or lost?
• not all surviving documents are available for researchers to use. The 30 year rule prevents access to some official documents for 30 years and, if classified as official secrets, they may not be available at all. Private documents such as diaries may never become available, or only after the death of the author
• certain groups may be unrepresented: the illiterate and those with limited leisure time, are unlikely to keep diaries. The better educated classes are thus likely to be over represented

Question 23

4. Meaning

Answer 23

• the researcher may need special skills to understand a document. It may have to be translated from a foreign language; words may change their meaning over time
• we also have to interpret want the document actually means to the writer and the intended audience. Different sociologists may interpret the same document differently. Thomas later admitted that the interpretations he and zaniecki had offered in their book were not a least based on the data from the documents

Question 24

Advantages of documents

Answer 24

• although documents need to be assessed carefully by the sociologists before they are used as sources of evidence, nevertheless they have several important advantages;
• personal documents such as diaries and letters enable the researcher to get close to the social actors reality, giving insight through their richly detailed qualitative data. Interprevists favour them for this reason
• sometimes documents are the only course of information, e.g, in studying the past
• by providing another source of data, documents offer an extra check on the results obtained by primary methods
• they are a cheap source of data, because someone else has already gathered the information. For the same reason, using existing documents saves the sociologist time

Question 25

Content analysis

Answer 25

• content analysis is a method for dealing systematically the contents of documents. It is best known for its use in analysing documents produced by the mass media, such as television news bulletins or advertisement
• although such documents are usually qualitative, content analysis enables the sociologist to produce quantitative data from these sources
• lobban uses content analysis to analyse gender roles in children’s reading schemes, while Tuchman used it to analyse television portrayal of women. Lobban and Tuchman both found that females were portrayed in a range of roles that was both limited and stereotyped. E.g, lobban found that female characters were generally portrayed playing domestic roles

Question 26

Advantages of content analysis

Answer 26

• it is cheap
• to is usually easy to find sources of material in the form of newspapers, television broadcasts etc
• positivists see it as a useful source of objective quantitive, scientific data
• however, interprevists sociologists argue that simply counting up the number of times something appears in a document tells us nothing about its meaning