Statistics

• • Official statistics are quantitative data collected by national and local government or other official agencies.
  • Official statistics include data relating to births, deaths, and marriages/civil partnerships, unemployment figures, educational attainment data (e.g. GCSE results) and crime figures.
• Advantages


  • Useful for evaluating social policy.
  • Often, the only data available for a specific area of study.
  • Cheap and easy to collect.
  • Objective and reliable, as they are usually collected under strict guidelines.
• Advantages


  • Can cover a very long time span and cover large samples and even the whole population (such as census information).
  • Due to the large samples, they are likely to be representative and generalisable.
  • Able to make before and after assumptions of changes over time, such as the number of people marrying, infant mortality rates or changes in academic attainment.
• Advantages 


  • Can provide useful background information and help researchers establish links between different data sets, such as the relationship between poverty and academic attainment.
  • Because they are publicly available, there are unlikely to be any ethical issues.
• Disadvantages


  • Because the data is collected for administrative and policy purposes (and specifically for sociological research) classification and definitions may vary or not be useful.
  • Data produced by the state might have been presented in such a way as to make the government look better or avoid embarrassment.
• Disadvantages 


  • If they are inaccurate or incomplete, they may not provide a complete picture.
  • Interpretivists claim that they are invalid because they represent social constructions; they are collected for a specific purpose (that of policy) and what is and is not collected is decided by the government.