official statistics Flashcards
1
Q
what are official statistics?
A
- produced by the government or other official bodies e.g. crime/unemployment statistics
- collected from registration/births/marriages/deaths
- collected from large scale surveys e.g. census
2
Q
crime statistics
A
- they are not valid
- victims may be scared to report
- small crimes may be pointless to record
- protecting people (family, friends)
- may not know if you’re a victim of crime
3
Q
advantages of official statistics
A
- cheap and readily available
- come from large samples (census) so can be representative
- cover large spans so they can be used to identify social trends
- make comparisons between different social groups i.e. males/females/social class
- high levels of reliably
- they are useful for background information when creating a hypothesis
4
Q
disadvantages of official statistics
A
- government collects them for their own purpose (they can change definitions to make statistics go down)
- the ‘dark figure’ - do they measure what they claim to - domestic violence/crime/unemployment are regularly redefined by the government
- leads to serious underestimations
5
Q
theoretical considerations
A
- positivists see them as very valuable
- official statistics are objective social facts
- positivists use them to find cause and effect relationships
- they provide quantitive data
- they are usually taken from large scale representative samples
6
Q
interpretivist opinion
A
- they lack validity
- represent the labels some people give to the behaviour of others
- statistics are simply social constructs
7
Q
ethical considerations
A
they avoid all ethical issues as they are publicly available
8
Q
using official statistics to investigate education:
A
- lots of statistics for education are available
FOR EXAMPLE:
- exam results
- pupils on FSM
- truancy and attendance
- subject choices
- pupils with special needs
- gender/ethnicity achievement
- statistics allow sociologists to make comparisons relating to social groups
- they are collected regularly which means you can identify trends
- all state schools have to complete a census three times a year - very highly representative data
- reliability is also high as the government set the definitions and categories for schools to use