official statistics

• practical

  • advantage: free source of huge amounts of data - state can afford to conduct large scale surveys costing millions of pounds - sociologists can make use of this, using less time + money
  • disadvantage: government collects statistics for their own use, not for the benefit of sociologists, statistics may not be available for a specific topic = reduced opportunity
• theoretical

  • advantage - representativeness - official statistics cover large areas eg statistics gathered by compulsory legislations eg birth and death rates = more representative sample collected = more generalisable, better for hypotheses testing 
  • disadvantage - representativeness - statistics produced from official surveys may only be based on a range of the relevant population eg british crime survey
  • advantage: reliable - compiled in a standardised way by trained staff, following set procedures, increased replicability = increased reliability
  • disadvantage - validity - soft statistics have a less valid picture eg police statistics not recording all crime (domestic violence), hard has a more valid picture though eg birth/death rates 
• positivist

  • sees official statistics as a ‘social fact’ - true and objective
  • sociology is a science, wants to develop hypotheses to help establish cause and effect 

  interpretivists

  • lacks validity because the numerics don’t represent real things as the statistics are a social construct 

  marxism

  • statistics serve capitalist interests by favouring ruling class ideology - isn’t a neutral method
  • eg police statistics undermine numbers of people against capitalism, decreasing chances of revolution