STATISTICS

Question 1

Official Statistics:

Answer 1

• (quantitative data gathered by the government or other bodies like businesses, e.g. on death rates. They’re useful for policy making, e.g. with education (Ofsted). They can be collected through registration or official surveys.)

Question 2

Atkinson (Validity, The Dark Figure of Crime, Interpretivism)-

Answer 2

• Argue that official statistics lack validity as they do not represent real things or ‘social facts’.
• They are simply social constructs. Suicide statistics do not represent the ‘real rate’ of suicides that have actually taken place, but merely the total number of decisions made by people to label said action a suicide.
• Not only is this labelling a problem, but the validity is also lessened by the ‘dark figure of crime’.
• ‘Hard’ statistics often succeed in doing this as statistics on the number of births, deaths and marriages are easier to record. * However, ‘soft’ statistics gives a much less valid, as, for example, police statistics do not record all crimes, and similarly educational statistics do not record all racist incidents occurring in schools. Self-report studies and victim surveys have been utilised in an attempt to help improve these statistics, e.g.
• the Crime Survey for England and Wales.
• This has helped as the survey in 2011 did find that only 38% of crimes revealed by the survey were actually reported to the police.

Question 3

Eval (Durkheim, Positivism)-

Answer 3

Positivists like Durkheim see official stats as valuable. The fact they are merely just ‘social facts’ reflects that they are a true and objective measure of the real rate of crime, like suicide. These statistics help to create a hypothesis as they can be a starting point for researching behaviours.

Question 4

Practical (Advantages)-

Answer 4

• They often provide a huge amount of data.
• Only the state can afford to conduct large-scale surveys costing millions of pounds, e.g. the Census covering every household in the UK.
• The government also has the power to compel citizens to provide it with information, like requiring parents to register births, and so using this data can also save sociologists time and money.
• The fact that people are more compelled to report to official statistics also means that they tend to be very representative as with things like birth or death rates it’s required to be documented by everyone.
• This also makes them reliable as they’re often all collected in an similar way.
• Statistics also allow for comparing groups, e.g. comparing educational achievement between different classes.
• As official statistics are collected at regular intervals, they often show trends and patterns over time, meaning that sociologists can use them for a ‘before and after’, showing cause-and-effect. We can easily compare divorce rates, making these stats quick to use.

Question 5

Eval (Practical Disadvantages, Durkheim)-

Answer 5

• Government statistics are often collected for its own purpose and not for the benefit of the sociologists and so when studying a certain topic may be of no help at all.
• Durkheim found that in his study of suicide that there were virtually no statistics specifically on the religion of the suicide victims as the state didn’t have use for this information.
• Not only this but the states definitions on certain topics may be different to that of the sociologists- they may define something like ‘poverty’ or ‘truancy’ in a different light, which could lead to miscommunications over how large a problem is.
• Definitions tend to change overtime too, which means that comparing statistics across the years may be difficult (the definition for unemployment changed over 30 times during the 1980s).