official statistics Flashcards

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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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6
Q

interpretivist opinion

A
  • they lack validity
  • represent the labels some people give to the behaviour of others
  • statistics are simply social constructs
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7
Q

ethical considerations

A

they avoid all ethical issues as they are publicly available

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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
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