official statistics

Question 1

what are official statistics?

Answer 1

• 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

Question 2

crime statistics

Answer 2

• 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

Question 3

advantages of official statistics

Answer 3

• 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

Question 4

disadvantages of official statistics

Answer 4

• 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

Question 5

theoretical considerations

Answer 5

• 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

Question 6

interpretivist opinion

Answer 6

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

Question 7

ethical considerations

Answer 7

they avoid all ethical issues as they are publicly available

Question 8

using official statistics to investigate education:

Answer 8

• 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