Statistics complete

• Secondary sources

  Data previously made by one sociologist can be used later by another sociologist
• Secondary data


  Information from secondary sources
• Types of secondary data

  • Official statistics
  • Historical statistics
• Official statistics


  Quantitative data gathered by the government or other official bodies
• Examples of official statistics

  • Data on births, deaths, marriages and divorces
  • School exclusions
  • Crime
  • Suicide
  • Unemployment
  • Census of the UK population
• Purpose of official statistics

  For government policy-making
• Ways of collecting official statistics

  1. Registration

  2. Official surveys
• Advantages of official statistics

  • Free source of huge amounts of data
  • Allow comparisons between groups
  • Show trends and patterns over time
• Disadvantages of official statistics

  • May not be available on the topic of interest
  • Definitions used may differ from sociologists
  • Definitions may change over time making comparisons difficult
• Representativeness of official statistics

  • Often cover very large numbers or even entire populations
  • Compulsory statistics like births and deaths are highly representative
  • Surveys like the Crime Survey are less representative but still much larger than sociologists could do
• Reliability of official statistics

  • Generally seen as reliable due to standardised procedures and trained staff
  • But not always wholly reliable due to errors or omissions
• Validity issues with official statistics

  The 'dark figure' problem - they may not actually measure what they claim to
• Some official statistics are 'hard' (e.g. births, deaths) while others are 'soft' (e.g. crime)
• Positivists see official statistics as objective social facts


  They provide reliable, generalisable and representative data
• Interpretivists see official statistics as social constructs


  They lack validity as they don't represent real things, just labels applied by officials
• Marxists see official statistics as serving the interests of the capitalist ruling class


  They are part of ruling-class ideology that disguises the true level of problems like unemployment
• positivism 


  Durkheim sees statistics as a valuable resource for sociologists. they see sociology as a science and they devolved hypothesis to discover the cause of the behaviour patterns that the statistics reveal
• Interpretivism

  Maxwell Atkinson 1971 regards official statistics as lacking validity
• Marxism


  John Irvin 1987 see them as serving the interest of capitalism