official statistics

• official statistics

  • secondary data produced by the government or official bodies
  • sources to create official statistics:
  • registration - law requires parents to register births
  • official statistics - like the Census or general household survey
  • administrative records - state agencies like hospitals, courts and schools
• practical advantages of official statistics

  • free source of huge amounts of quantitative data- easily accessable
  • only the state has the power to compel individuals to supply certain data- reduces the problem of non-response e.g. Census (the ten-yearly Census of the entire UK population) refusal rate was only 5%
  • easy to make comparisons between groups
  • because they are collected at regular intervals, they show trends and patterns over time- sociologists can use them to identify correlations between variables and suggest cause and effect relationships
• practical disadvantages

  • government creates statistics for its own purposes, not for sociologist's particular topic e.g. the french state does not collect data on the race, religion or ethnicity of its citizens
  • definitions used by state may be different for sociologists e.g. truancy
  • may be in states interests to make problem appear smaller by redefining it
• positivism and official statistics

  • see them as reliable, objective social facts- important resource in the scientific study of society
  • represenatative, qualititative data that allows sociologist to identify and measure behaviour patterns, test hypothesis and develop casual laws
• representativeness

  • important to positivists because they wish to make general statements about society as a whole and how it shapes our behaviour- important studys are represenative or generalisable to wider population
  • official stats often large scale
• reliability

  • positivists regard official stats as relaible source of data
  • compiled by trained staff who use standardised categories and collection techniques and follow a set of procedures that can easily be replicated by others
  • however, still may make errors, or omit information or members may fill out form incorrectly
• interpretivism and statistics (Cicourel)

  • interpretivists reject positivist claim that official stats are real, objective social facts
  • stats merely social constructs that represent labels officials attach to people
• soft facts (interpretivists)

  • much less valid picture of reality- complied from administative records created by state agencies like schools e.g. truancy statistics represent the number of pupils defined as truanting, not actuality
  • neglect dark figureof unrecorded cases e.g. schools may keep record of racist incidents, but pupils dont report all of them
• hard statistics

  • provide much more valid picture as:
  • created from registration data
• marxism and statistics

  • marxists reject the positivist claim that official stats are objective facts, they serve the interests of capitalism
  • part of ideological state apparatus - the function of official stats is to conceal or distort reality and maintain the capitalist class in power
• feminism and statistics

  • oakley and graham reject the use of quantitive research methods as regarded as masculine, patrarchal model of research
  • official stats created by the state - who maintained patriarchal oppression