secondary sources Flashcards
quantitative sources
official statistics
non official statistics
existing quantitative sociological research
qualitative sources
existing qualitative research methods
public documents
personal documents
historical documents
two ways of collecting official statistics
registration - laws require parents to register births
official surveys - census or general household survey
advantages of official statistics
important for planning and evaluating social policy.
easy accessibility once collected and cheap.
likely to be representative.
cover a long time span.
allow for comparisons of different social groups.
disadvantages of official statistics
they might not tell the whole story.
they are collected for administration, not for sociological research.
the way the statistics are collected may change over time.
some sociologists argue statistics are socially constructed.
produced by the state -they might be ‘massaged’.
hard statistics
statistics on the number of deaths, births, marriages and divorces give a very accurate picture
soft statistics
less valid picture
police statistics do not record all crimes
educational statistics do not record all racist incidents occurring in schools
positivism
positivists see statistics as a valuable tool.
they see sociology as a science and develop hypotheses to discover the causes of the behaviour patterns found by statistics.
they use official statistics to test their hypotheses
interpretivism
interpretivists view statistics as lacking validity.
official statistics are said to be socially constructed (represent the labels people give to the behaviour of others) rather than being based on facts.
interpretivists make this criticism because official statistics are created by social processes.
thus more interested in investigating how they are constructed.
marxists and feminists
argue that official statistics serve the elite
official statistics reflect the biases and prejudices of those in power
marxists argue corporate or financial crimes committed by the elite are not focused on by the government
documents
public documents - produced by organisations such as government
departments, schools, welfare agencies, businesses and charities (e.g. ofsted reports, published company accounts)
private documents - first-person accounts of social events and experiences e.g. letters, diaries, photo albums, autobiographies
historical documents - a personal or public document that was created in the past e.g. old parish records interpretivists tend to favour documents (validity). positivists tend to reject them (no reliability, can’t generalise, not representative)
the four criteria
scott - when assessing documents you must assess them using the following criteria:
authenticity - is it fake? hitler diaries
credibility - is it believable? - thomas and znaniecki’s polish immigrants may have lied in their letters home about how good life in the usa was to justify their decision to emigrate
representativeness - is the evidence in the document typical? certain groups may be unrepresented such as the illiterate
meaning - have we interpreted it correctly?
advantages of documents
diaries and letters enable the researcher to get close to the social actor’s reality giving insight through richly qualitative data
only source of information for studying the past
by providing another source of data, documents offer an extra check on the results obtained by primary methods
cheap
content analysis
is a method for dealing systematically with the contents of documents.
although documents themselves are normally qualitative, content analysis allows sociologists to produce quantitative accounts.
lobban used content analysis to analyse gender roles in reading schemes.
it is cheap, easy to find (lots of sources), positivists can use it in an objective, quantitative way.
interpretivists would say that counting the amount of times something appears in a document tells us nothing about its meaning.
