Statistics

Question 1

What are Statistics?

Answer 1

A form of numerical data where the objective is to quantify some aspects of society, providing a wide variety of data that would normally be inaccessible to the public.

Question 2

What are Official Statistics?

Answer 2

Data collected and published by Governments, such as crime statistics.

Question 3

What are Non-Official Statistics?

Answer 3

Data collected and published by a variety of public and private organisations. For example: the Rowntree Foundation publishes poverty statistics.

Question 4

What is a Hard Statistic?

Answer 4

Objective statistics that cannot be manipulated (social facts) such as birth rates.

Question 5

What is a Soft Statistic?

Answer 5

Subjective, less reliable statistics that can be manipulated. For example: Government manipulating unemployment statistics by not including homeless people in order to make the problem look less drastic.

Question 6

Strengths of Statistics:

Answer 6

Representative, generalisable, information on offenders, can establish trends, easy to access, cheap, easy to analyse, don’t need specific skills, reliable.

Question 7

Weaknesses of Statistics:

Answer 7

No informed consent, may be a lack of statistics for the topic you’re interested in, political bias in soft statistics, can be low in validity.