Practical disadvantages

• The gov collects statistics for its own purpose and not for the benefit of sociologists, so there may be none available on the topic we are interested in e.g Durkheim in his study of suicide found that there was no statistics specifically on the religion of the victims
• Definitions that the gov uses in collecting the data may be different from those that sociologists would use e.g they my define "poverty" or "truancy" differently, this may lead to different views of how large the problem is