Secondary sources: Official Statistics Flashcards
Official statistics
> Qunatative data gathered by the government or other official bodies.
> They use official statistics to identify beginnings of sociail problems that it is hoped policy-making can then tackle.
Official statistics are often used to help monitor:
> education outcomes
> changing patterns in births and deaths
> changing patterns of marriage and divorce
> Changing patterns of crime in society
Postives:
> It is very reliable, hard statistics are near to 100% accurate, householders are required by law to complete surveys results to the government.
> They can be quick and easy to access.
> Official statistics are completely free to access.
Durkehim:
Le suicide
In his research on suicide, durkehim used offical statistics from different countries across Europe.
He found that there were correlations in the background circumstances of those who died e.g. excessive social integration with suicide bombers.
He also found that those who were controlled by society (those in prison) or (those who had lost everything) were at much greater risk.
He concluded that suicide is a social fact - something that objectively exists and can be measured. Only official statistics produce such valuable information.
Maxwell Atkinson (1971)
Discovering suicide:
Atkinson belives official suicide statistics are socially constructed and lack reliability.
He claims that sucide statistics merely reperesent the labels and definitons that coroners (somebody who classifies how somebody died) give to a persons death.
Coroners are more willing to record suicide verdicts than others.
This distorts the patterns and trends in suicde and creates a misleading picture to how suicide in one town differs from another.
Coroners define sucide differently between various countries also making it hugely problematic.
Suicide statistics are invalid as no one is 100% sure why someone ended there life and is somewhat a guess.
Official (police) crime statistics
Official (police) crime statistics give all the data that the police have put together during the previous 12 months.
The data gives the government an indicator of all the data the police have recorded and allows them to see how trends of crime have changed over time.
Positives:
> There is a few, if any ethical problems with official statistics. They are unobstrusive which means sociologist can make good use of them without offending anybody.
> Positivists sociologists claim that official statistics are high in representativeness. The cover a large number of people.
> They are high in reliability. Hard statistics give near enough 100% accuracy.
Negatives:
> Interpretivists sociologists believe official statistics are too easily trusted, but in actual fact lack reliability and validity. They belive most staitsics are soft which can be easily manipulated in a way that it suits a person.
Conflict perspectives:
The problem with official statistcis
> Conflict perspectives, such as Marxism and Feminism, agree with the concerns raised by phenomenologists regarding the usefulness of official statistics.
Phenomenology regards official statistics as a social construction, however, conflict perspectives look more at the way in which they can be manipulated and dsitorted to represent the interests of powerful groups.
Marxist views of official statistics:
Marxists point out that official statistics can, in the hands of powerful people and the powerful organisations they represent, mislead people about what research findings show.
BBCNEWS:
“Inadvertently we are putting pressure on officers to do all they can to manipulate to create crime reductions”
> Marxists claim that official statistics are manipulative.
> It is governments departments and organisations who provide the ‘official stamp’ to official statistics - therefore government gives the data that it decides is most important and trustworthy a degree of status - undermining other data.
> This helps the general public to be persuaded and trust in these ‘facts’ that the government present to the population.
