Official stats

• Official stats, positivists 


  Quantitative data collected by the government, e.g. births, deaths, crime

  • Source of secondary data
• Hard stats


  Objective, politicians can't change them, e.g. births and marriages
• Soft stats


  Subjective and politicians can change them, e.g. stats on poverty, crime and employment
• Examples of official stats

  • UK Census - survey of every household carried out every 10 years
  • TV ratings
• Strengths of official stats

  • Cheap and easy to access large amounts of data
  • Reliable, can explore changes over time
• Weaknesses on official stats

  • Lack validity, government may present stats in a biased way, manipulate to make their politics more favourable, e.g. crime stats may say more about policing than actual crime factors
  • Definitions and the way data is collected may vary, impossible to compare data, definition of unemployment changes