Secondary data

Question 1

2 types of secondary data:

Answer 1

• Official statistics
• media products

Question 2

Official statistics:

Answer 2

• Positivists type of data because they are quantifiable
• Numerical data that is officially sourced from the government
• E.g. Information from the census

Question 3

Unofficial statistics:

Answer 3

• From unofficial sources
• Smaller samples
• E.g. From employers and trade unions

Question 4

Hard statistics:

Answer 4

• Registered
• Births, deaths, marriages and divorces

Question 5

Soft statistics:

Answer 5

• Unregistered statistics
• Crime and unemployment

Question 6

Strength of official statistics:

Answer 6

• Collected in a standardised way
• Up to date
• Allow trends to be found over time
• Easy and cheap
• Large representative scale

Question 7

Weakness’ of official statistics:

Answer 7

• Open to political manipulation
• Statistics are socially constructed
• Statistics tell us little about human interpretation
• May not be representative of the problem that the sociologist is studying

Question 8

Media products;

Answer 8

• Adverts, TV, magazines, newspapers
• These can tell us about current values and priorities in society
• Content analysis is used to analyse these products

Question 9

Content analysis for media products:

Answer 9

• Design a content analysis schedule which outline a list of things that the research is looking for
• then record how many times each category happened
• Create a tally which will produce numerical data

Question 10

What type of data does content analysis produce ?

Answer 10

• Quantitative

Question 11

Strengths of media products:

Answer 11

• Cheap
• Comparative over time (longitudinal)
• Reliable (inter-observer reliability)

Question 12

Limitations of media products:

Answer 12

• Time-consuming
• Subjective (when choosing what categories)
• May analyse a media product out of context