Secondary data

• Secondary sources

  Data gathered or produced by other people for their own particular purposes, but which sociologists make use of in their research
• Examples of secondary sources

  • Official statistics
  • Documents
• Official statistics


  Quantitative data gathered by the government or other official bodies
• Examples of official statistics

  • Statistics on births, deaths, marriages and divorces
  • Exam results
  • School exclusions
  • Crime
  • Suicide
  • Unemployment
  • Health
• Ways of collecting official statistics

  1. Registration

  2. Official surveys
• The government collects official statistics to use in policy-making
• Ofsted and the Department for Education use statistics on things such as exam results to monitor the effectiveness of schools and colleges
• In addition to official statistics produced by the government, organisations and groups such as trade unions, charities, businesses and churches also produce various kinds of statistics
• Advantages of official statistics

  • They are a free source of huge amounts of data
  • They allow comparisons between groups
  • They show trends and patterns over time
• Disadvantages of official statistics

  • The government collects statistics for its own purpose and not for the benefit of sociologists
  • The definitions used may be different from those that sociologists would use
  • If definitions change over time, it may make comparisons difficult
• Representativeness of official statistics

  • Statistics gathered by compulsory registration are likely to cover virtually all cases and therefore be highly representative
  • Statistics produced from official surveys may be less representative as they are only based on a sample of the relevant population
• Reliability of official statistics

  • They are compiled in a standardised way by trained staff, following set procedures
  • They are not always wholly reliable as there may be errors or omissions in recording the data
• The 'dark figure' or problem with using official statistics is that of validity - do they actually measure the thing that they claim to measure?
• Hard official statistics generally give a more accurate picture than 'soft' statistics which give a much less valid picture
• Attempts have been made to compensate for the shortcomings of police statistics by using self-report or victim studies to give a more accurate picture of the extent of crime
• Positivists see official statistics as valuable, objective social facts, while interpretivists regard them as lacking validity and being socially constructed
• Marxists see official statistics as serving the interests of capitalism rather than being neutral
• Interpretivists


  Argue that we should investigate how statistics are socially constructed, rather than taking them at face value
• Interpretivists investigate how statistics are socially constructed

  Using qualitative methods such as observing coroners' courts to discover how they reach decisions to label deaths
• Marxists


  Do not regard official statistics as merely the outcome of labels applied by officials, but see them as serving the interests of capitalism
• Capitalist society is made up of two social classes in conflict: the capitalist ruling class and the working class
• The state is not neutral, but serves the interests of the capitalist class, and the statistics it produces are part of ruling-class ideology
• Document

  Any written text, such as personal diaries, government reports, novels, newspapers, etc. Also includes texts such as paintings, drawings, photographs, maps, sounds and images from film, television, radio, etc.
• Types of documents

  • Public documents (produced by organisations)
  • Personal documents (letters, diaries, autobiographies, etc.)
• Historical documents are personal or public documents created in the past, and are often the only source of information for studying the past
• Examples of historical documents used in family and household studies

  • Parish records
  • Parliamentary reports on child labour
  • Child-rearing manuals and paintings
• Criteria for evaluating documents

  • Authenticity
  • Credibility
  • Representativeness
  • Meaning
• Positivists tend to reject documents because they fail to achieve the main positivist goals of reliability, generalisability and representativeness
• Interpretivists tend to favour documents because they achieve the main interpretivist goal of validity
• Content analysis


  A method for dealing systematically with the contents of documents, enabling the sociologist to produce quantitative data from qualitative sources
• Steps in content analysis

  1. Decide on categories

  2. Study the source and place characters/content into categories

  3. Count the number in each category
• Content analysis has advantages of being cheap and providing a useful source of objective, quantitative, scientific data for positivists
• Interpretivist sociologists argue that simply counting the number of times something appears in a document tells us nothing about its meaning