Research Methods - Official Statistics
- Created by: xpoppywilliams
- Created on: 26-03-18 09:27
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- Official Statistics
- Quantitative data gathered by the government or other official bodies
- Examples include statistics on: births, deaths, marriages, divorces, exam results, crime, unemployment, health etc
- Governments use them for policy-making
- Other organisations and groups can also collect data
- E.g. trade unions, charities, businesses and churches
- Two ways of collecting official statistics
- Registration - e.g. the law requires parents to register births
- Official Surveys - e.g. census or general household surveys
- Practical Issues
- Advantages
- Free source of large amounts of data - saves time and money
- Allows comparisons between groups
- Collected at regular intervals - shows trends and patterns over time - can use them for 'before and after' studies
- Disadvantages
- Governments collect statistics for their own purpose - may not be any available in the topic of interest for the sociologist
- Definitions used by the state may be different to those the sociologist uses
- Definitions may change over time - makes comparisons difficult
- Advantages
- Repetitiveness
- Advantages
- Cover large numbers of people
- Care is taken with sampling procedures
- Provide a better basis for making generalisations and testing hypotheses
- Disadvantages
- Some statistics may be less representative
- Only based on a sample of the relevant population
- Some statistics may be less representative
- Advantages
- Reliability
- Advantages
- Complied in a standardised way by trained staff who follow set procedures
- Disadvantages
- Census coders may make errors or omit information when recording data
- Members of the public may fill information forms in incorrectly
- Advantages
- Validity
- Do they actually measure the thing they claim to measure?
- 'Hard' official statistics =succeed
- 'Soft' official statistics = less valid picture
- Do they actually measure the thing they claim to measure?
- Positivists
- Statistics are a valuable resource
- Official statistics are 'social facts'
- They are true and objective measures of real information
- Use official statistics to test their hypotheses
- Interpretivists
- Official statistics lack validity
- Don't represent real things or social facts
- Socially constructed - represent labels some people give to the behaviour of others
- Should investigate how they are socially constructed
- Quantitative data gathered by the government or other official bodies
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