Secondary sources

Question 1

What are official statistics?

Answer 1

• **quantitative data **gathered by the government or other official bodies e.g. on social group differences in achievement, school attendance, truancy , gender & subject choice
• secondary data as it gathered by official agencies for their own particular purposes

Question 2

What are the practical advantages of official statistics for studying education?

Answer 2

• free source of huge amounts of data, only the state can afford to conduct large scale surveys & gather data for alot of schools > sociologists can make use of data saving time & money >
• statistics allow for comparison between groups e.g. compare statistics on educational achievement between different social groups
• they show trends & patterns over time as they are collected at regular intervals > can use to show cause and effect relationships ‘before & after’ > up to data data e.g. trends in exam results

Question 3

What are the practical disadvantages of using official statistics to investigate education?

Answer 3

• governments collect statistics for its own purpose and not for the benefit of sociologists (not all info available) e.g. Durkheim found there were no statitistics specifically on the religion of suicide victims similary no statistics on langauge, social class & achievement
• The definition that the state use in collecting data may be different to that of sociologists e.g may define poverty differently, or pupils social class based on parents job
• OS are socially constructed
• tell us very little about the ‘why’ behind the data

Question 4

What are the theoretical advantages of using official statistics to investigate education?

Answer 4

• highly representative e.g. all state schools have to complete a census every year which collects information on attendance, ethnicity & gender, FSM etc
• positivist see as reliable as they can be used to test hypotheses e.g. statistics on exam results showing social class differences may correlate with statistics on parental income
• soft statistics give a less valid picture e.g. educational OS do not record all racist incidents in schools

Question 5

What are the theoretical disadvantages of using official statistics to investigate education?

Answer 5

• I >statistics are socially constructed as schools can manipulate them e.g. attendance figures & truancy statistics > may be tempted to do so due to the pressures of educational market (positive image, funding & parent support) > decreased validity
• governments may change definitions e.g. Conservatives with league tables of school performance defined only on exam results > labour government introduced new measure called contextual value added which also took into account level of deprivation pupils suffer> harder for sociologists to draw comparison

Question 6

What are documents?

Answer 6

• refers to any written text such as government reports, emails etc
• public documents are produced by organisations such as the government, school etc > includes documents such as Ofsted reports of school inspections etc
• personal documents included items such as letters which consists of qualitative data that reflect the writers feelings or attitudes

Question 7

What are the practical advantages of using documents to investigate education?

Answer 7

• public documents are easily accessible due to government policies emphasising parental choice > schools may large number of documents available e.g. Gillborn was able to access a wide range of school policy statements, local authority guidelines on anti-racism etc

Question 8

What are the practical disadvantages of using documents to investigate education?

Answer 8

• personal documents can be difficult to access e.g. Hey made use of notes girls passed around to understand friendship patterns > not always easy to obtain
• some educational documents are confidential e.g. personnel files & pupils disciplinary records so sociologists may be unable to gain access to them

Question 9

What ethical issues are there with documents?

Answer 9

• few ethical concerns with using public documents produced by the school as their placed in public domain > permission not needed
• ethical problems with personal documents e.g. Hey collected notes from the girls desk at the end of lesson > informed consent for their use may not have been obtained

Question 10

What are the theoretical advantages of using documents to investigate education?

Answer 10

• some official documents are legally required of all schools& colleges e.g. racist incidents > more likely that sociologist can form a representative picture of racism across the whole country
• many public documents e.g. attendance registers are produced in a systematic format > enables researchers to make direct comparisons of the absence rates
• documents can provide important insights into the meanings held by teachers & pupils > therefore high in validity

Question 11

What are the theoretical disadvantages of using documents to investigate education?

Answer 11

• not all racist incidents document for example > reduce representativeness
• accidents when filling in registers or other data reduce reliability
• documents are open to different interpretations