Topic 7: Secondary sources

• Official statistics 


  Gathered by government or other official bodies. E.g. stats on births, deaths, marriages. Government government collect official statistics to use in policy making EG stats on births help the government plan the future number of school places. And the Department of education used statistics on things such as exam results to monitor the effectiveness of schools and colleges. Two ways to collect official statistics:

  • Registration, eg the law requires parents to register births
  • Official surveys, such as the census or the general household survey
• Quantitive secondary sources

  postivists prefer these

  • Official statistics
  • Non-official statistics
  • Existing quantitive sociological research
• Qualitative secondary sources


  Interpretivist would prefer this

  • Existing qualitative sociological research
  • Public documents
  • Personal documents
  • Historical documents
• Official statistics

  Practical

  • Advantages- for a huge amount of free data, allows comparisons between groups, shows patterns overtime meaning sociologist can use them for before and after studies to show cause-and-effect relationships
  • Disadvantages- not available available on all topics, different definitions can cause confusion e.g. official definition of unemployment changed over 30 times during the 1980s and early 1990s
• Official statistics

  Representativeness

  Large number because care is taken with sampling procedures so they produce more representative sample and surveys conducted with limited resources available to the sociologist. some statistics are less representative than others e.g. stats gathered by compulsory registration such as birth and death statistics are more representative than statistics produced from official survey such as the British crime survey or general household survey as they are only based on the sample of the relevant population.
• Officials statistics

  Reliability

  • Reliable as they are compiled in a standardised way by trained staff following set procedures. E.g. government statisticans compile death rate for different social classes following a standard procedure that uses the occupation recorded on each persons death certificate to identify their class.
  • But official statistics aren’t always reliable, e.g. census coders may make errors or omit information when recording data from census forms
• Official statistics


  Validity- the ‘dark figure’

  • Soft statistics, e.g. police reports less valid as they don’t record all crime
  • Attempts have been made to compensate for the shortcomings of police stats by using self report or victim studies to give a more accurate picture of the amount of crime
  • By comparing the results with the police statistics, we can estimate the real rate of crime
• Official statistics-positivism/interpretivisa

  Positivists- such as Durkheim sea statistics as a valuable resource for sociologists seek to develop hypothesis to discover the causes of behaviour patterns that the statistics reveal and official statistics allow them to test their hypothesis

  • Interpretivism- Atkinson argue they lack validity as they don’t represent real things that exist in the world and our socially constructed eg suicide statistics on the actual number, deaths marked as suicide. interpretivist argue we should investigate how the statistics are socially constructed
• Official statistics- Marxism

  Marxists such as Irvine see official statistics as serving the interest of capitalism. Rc and wc in conflict with each other. The state serves the interest of the capitalist class.

  • statistics that the state produces are part of ruling class ideology that helps to maintain the capitalist class in power
• Documents


  Public documents- produced by organisations such as government departments, schools, welfare agencies, businesses, and charities. Some output maybe available available for researches to use including documents such as offset and records of parliamentary debate

  • Personal Documents-letters, diaries, photo albums and autobiographies. First person accounts of social events and personal experiences, include the writers feelings attitudes
• documents


  Historical documents- personal or public doc created in the past, if we want to study the past, historical documents are usually the only source of information. Laslett used parish records in his study of family structure in pre-industrial England.
• Documents- assessing documents


  John Scott put forward for criteria for a evaluating documents:

  • Authenticity- is the document what it claims to be, is there missing pages, if it is a copy is it free from errors, who actually wrote the document. e.g. Hitler diaries were later proven to be fake
  • Credibility- is it believable, was the author sincere, politicians may write diaries and tended for publication that may inflate their own importance. is the document accurate, Documents on the Internet are often not checked for accuracy before publication.
• Documents- assessing documents


  John Scott

  Representativeness-is evidence in the document typical, not all documents survive, are the surviving documents typical of the ones that get destroyed or lost. not all surviving documents are available available for researches to use use the 30 year prevents access to some official documents for 30 years

  • meaning- research and may need specialist skills to understand document, may have to be translated, words may change meaning overtime. We may have to interpret what the document actually means to the writer And the intended audience
• Documents- advantages


  Personal documents allow research to get close to the insight from the writer, documents are the only source of information in studying the past, they are cheap as someone has already gathered the information
• Documents- content analysis


  Gill describes how content analysis works: imagine we want to measure particular aspects of a media message e.g. how many female characters are being portrayed in paid employment:

  • first, we decide what categories we are going to use such as employee/full-time house
  • Next we study the source (broadcast magazine article) and place the characters in it into the categories we have decided upon
  • we can count the number in each category, for example we compare how women are portrayed as full-time housewives rather than employees