secondary sources of data - official statistics

Question 1

What is an official statistics?

Answer 1

Quantitative data gathered by the government or other official bodies - can be found on website of the Office for National Statistics.

Question 2

Examples of official statistics

Answer 2

( census / births / deaths / marriages / crime / suicide/ unemployment)

• Govt. collect data to use in policy making
• Charaties / trade unions / businesses and churches also collect statistics

Question 3

What are the two ways of collecting official statistics?

Answer 3

1) Registration - e.g law requires parents to register births
2) Official surveys - e.g census

Question 4

Practical advantages

Answer 4

• Free source to a significant amount of data → only state can afford to do such wide scale research e.g the Census / only state can compel ppl to do it
• Allow comparisons between groups → e.g compare education between gender
• Can show trends and patterns over time ( as collected at regular intervals) → able to gather causal relationships

Question 5

Practical disadvantages

Answer 5

• Govt collects data for own purpose - may be no statistics for sociologist interested in
  E.g Durkheims suicide study had no statistics specifically on religion of suicide victims
• Definitions state uses to collect data different from those sociologists would use → may create different views e.g poverty
• If definitions change overtime → hard to make comparisons
  Definition of unemployment changed between 1980 - 1990s so not comparing like with like

Question 6

theoretical

representativeness + / -

Answer 6

+ As a large sample is covered → more representative → able to make generalisations and test hypothesis
More people covered than an individual sociologist would be able to access

• Statistics gathered from official surveys - British crime survey / general household survey → may base on a sample of the relevant population

Question 7

theoretical

Reliability

Answer 7

++ Collects data in a standardised way by trained staff / following set procedures → reliable as those trained will allocate a given case to the same category

• -Not always wholly reliable → census coders make errors or omit information when recording data from census
• -Public may fill in the form incorrectly

Question 8

theoretical

Validity

Answer 8

++ Hard statistics - do succeed in doing this → marriage / death statistics do give an accurate picture

– Soft statistics - give a less valid picture → e.g police statistics do not record all crimed
– British crime survey 2011 found only 38% of crimes from the survey were reported to police

Question 9

positivism view

Answer 9

• Valuable resource for sociologists
• Statistics are true and objective measures of real rate of crime … etc
• Develop hypotheses to discover causes of behaviour patterns statistics reveal - science
• Use official statistics to test hypotheses
  Durkheim used official suicide statistics able to show protestants had a higher suicide rate than catholics

Question 10

Interpretivism

Answer 10

• Lack validity
• Do not represent real things or social facts
• Merely represent labels that some give to the behaviour
  E.G in suicide rates only tell us what coroners deem to be ‘suicide’

Should rather investigate how they are socially constructive