Official statistics

Question 1

Practical strength - gender and subject choice

Answer 1

• They are a free source of huge amounts of data that can be very useful when investigating subject choice
  For example, The Department for Education regularly publishes national statistics on GCSE and A levels subject entries by gender. (GOV collects statistics on over 30,000 primary and 4000 secondary schools.) This gives researchers access to huge, representative data without needing to spend time or money collecting themselves - helping them spot if subject choice between genders is getting worse.

Question 2

Practical limitation - gender and subject choice

Answer 2

• Government collect OS for for their own purpose, I’m not for sociologists, so that may be none available for subject choice that sociologists want to use. This means that sociologists struggle to gain a hypothesis for their research.
  e.g. they usually collect data on how many students of each gender take each subject. Sociologists are usually interested in students attitudes towards subjects, how gender stereotypes influence their choice etc.

Question 3

Ethical strength - gender and subject choice

Answer 3

• Very ethical as there is no name or address attached to the statistics. This protects us, the anonymity and privacy of individuals, which is key in an ethical principle of sociological research.
  For example, when using government education data to study how many boys and girls choose different A level subjects, sociologists can access useful patterns without contacting any students directly. This avoids issues such as informed consent and emotional harm, especially when researching young people. It’s especially beneficial when working with minors like school peoples where ethical approval can be harder to gain. - Known as DETACHED METHOD.

Question 4

Ethical limitation - gender and subject choice

Answer 4

• Governments may manipulate Data to South political agenda is raising concerns about bias, lack of transparency and misleading the public.
  For example, government may present school league tables or exam pass rates in a way that makes educational policies look more successful such as GIST and WISE as there is still a gender gap in physics although girls are making up biology.
• Irvine (1987) argues OS are only constructed to support the needs of capitalism - mislead the public such as if the state underreports or downplays gendered, subject patterns, it becomes harder for sociologists to challenge gender in equality in education, making it ethical as it sustains structural inequalities.

Question 5

Positivists - gender and subject choice

Answer 5

• Positivists are in favor of OS as they are ‘social facts’ due to them seeing sociology as a science so like natural scientists, they develop a hypothesis to discover the causes of the behavior patterns that the statistics reveal.
• Durkheim, put forward a hypothesis that suicide is caused by a lack of social integration. he used the comparative method and argued that Protestant and Catholic religions differ in how well they integrate into society. Using OS he was able to show that protestants had the highest suicide rate than Catholics, and then was able to argue that his statistical evidence proved his hypothesis correct.
• If a positivist is studying gender and subject choice they may use national exam data to explore how many girls versus boys take stem subjects, allowing them to make generalizations and test the hypothesis. - giving them reliable and representative data.

Question 6

Interpretivists - gender and subject choice (Maxwell Atkinson 1971)

Answer 6

• Atkinson argue they lack validity and do not present. real image or a ‘social fact’ that exists in the world.
• He argues OS on subject choice are not the ‘real rate’ of choices of subjects as there is no context behind why they took it lacking verstehen. Rather than taking them at face value, we should investigate how they are socially constructed .
• Say if less girls were taking physics, we don’t get the why and don’t know what has influences this lacking valid data.

Question 7

Conclusion

Answer 7

Official statistics can be good if you want to know who is taking what subject and to investigate the dynamic of percentages.
For example, as an analysis of whole population, it is good to compare government policies and the consequences of student behavior such as before GIST and WISE were introduced.
However, we must find out why people choose gender of teachers or peer pressure as without this we cannot make society better.