Topic 7: Secondary Sources

Question 1

Official Statistics

Answer 1

Quantitative data gathered by the government or official bodies, which can be used to help with policy-making

Question 2

Documents

Answer 2

Any written text

Question 3

Public Documents

Answer 3

Produced by organisations which are available to researchers e.g OFSTED, Black Report

Question 4

Personal Documents

Answer 4

First person accounts of social events and personal experiences

Question 5

Historical Documents

Answer 5

Personal or public document created in the past

Question 6

What are the two main sources of secondary data?

Answer 6

• Official statistics
• Documents

Question 7

What are the two ways of collecting official statistics?

Answer 7

• Registration
• Official surveys e.g census

Question 8

What are the different perspectives regarding official statistics?

Answer 8

• Positivists view them as ‘social facts’ which are true and objective e.g Durkheim’s study of suicide
• Interpretivists believe statistics are socially constructed (represent the labels some people give to the behaviour of others) e.g Atkinson’s coroners commonsense knowledge
• Marxists see them as serving the interests of capitalism as they maintain ruling class ideologies e.g unemployment rates, definition of unemployment changes to undermine the extent of the problem

Question 9

What are the advantages of official statistics?

Answer 9

• Practical:
  o saves time and money (free resource)
  o comparison and collected at regular intervals = cause-and-effect relationships
  o easy access
• Theoretical:
  o representative
  o reliable

Question 10

What are the disadvantages of official statistics?

Answer 10

• Practical problems:
  o government collects stats for their own purpose, might not have stats for what sociologists are interested in
  o definition state uses may be different from what sociologists use e.g poverty, truancy = difficult for comparison
• Theoretical problems:
  o lack validity, ‘hard statistics’ = valid BUT ‘soft’ statistics less valid not everything is reported e.g crimes, racist incidents and truancy in schools

Question 11

What are the advantages of documents?

Answer 11

• Practical:
  o saves time and money
  o easy to access
  o authentic as not written with research in mind
  o used to study past
• Theoretical:
  o valid = verstehen

Question 12

What are the disadvantages of documents?

Answer 12

• Practical problems:
  o time consuming to read
  o access
• Theoretical problems:
  o not reliable
  o not representative
  o researchers might impose their own opinions, interpret them differently
  o authenticity, credibility

Question 13

Content Analysis

Answer 13

Method for dealing systematically with the contents of documents to create quantitative data e.g Tuchman analyse TV portrayal of women