secondary sources

Question 1

what are official stats

Answer 1

data gathered by larger organisations, e,g gov, other official bodies
statistics on birth, divorce, marriage, deaths e.g 10 year UK census

Question 2

why may the government carry out data

Answer 2

changes in law making policies Ofsted + Department for Education may use stats on exam success and the gov makes changes to support people

Question 3

the two ways of collecting official statistics

Answer 3

registration - law requires parents to register births

official surveys - census / general household survey

Question 4

practical advantages of official statistics

Answer 4

free + huge amounts of data is accessible the gov holds the power to make large scale studies that is accessible

• stats allow for comparison between groups
• data collected as specific time intervals, we can measure the changes in patterns + trend overtime to show cause + effect

Question 5

practical disadvantages of official statistics

Answer 5

gov uses stats for own purpose so there may be non in the field that a sociologist is interested in
Durkheim found there were no stats on the religion on the suicide victims

• definitions that the state uses may be different in a sociologists perspective e.g poverty / truancy
• definitions may change overtime so it is hard to compare changes in history e.g definitions of unemployment changes over 30 times in the1980s

Question 6

advantages of official stats being representative

Answer 6

they have the power to have a large sample size by funding + people more willing to participate or required by law to offer information
so they can make more generalisations

stats like deaths + education are already known by institutions legally required e.g recording baby

Question 7

disadvantages of official stats being representative

Answer 7

some statistics less representable e.g those carried out by compulsory education provide a more representable sample

studies on specific groups e.g the General Household Survey only focuses crime groups which most sociolgists can conduct themselves

Question 8

reliability and secondary scources of data

Answer 8

they are completed in a standardised way and so they will be reliable as all participants will be treated the same - we can make comparisons of different participants

Question 9

why may official stats not be very reliable

Answer 9

census coders may be make errors or omit info when recording data from census forms/ members of public may fill in form incorrectly

Question 10

hard and soft statistics in giving valid data

Answer 10

hard stats do succeed in validity e.g statistics on the nubmer of deaths, marriages, divorce generally give accurate measurement, some births may go unrecorded

soft data less likely to give valid data because some things may go unrecorded

Question 11

positvism and official stats

Answer 11

Durkheim likes these stats because they provide social facts. objective measures of true rates
they develop a hypothesis to investigate causes and effects

Question 12

interpretivism and official statistics

Answer 12

Atkinson regard official stats as lacking validity
stats do not represent true things in society. statistics are socially constructed
e.g suicide rates are just what are ruled as suicide when it may not be a suicide at all

Question 13

what is the Marxist view of official stats according to this marxists

Answer 13

Irvine - do not regard official stats as merely the outcome of labels applied by officials. instead statistics meet the needs of capitalism e.g in unemployment statistics
they change the definition of unemployment so that they decrease the number of people who seem to be unemployed

Question 14

what are public documents

Answer 14

documents produced by government organisations , schools, welfare, radio, media
e.g Ofsted inspections , council meetings , parliamentary debates

Question 15

black report

Answer 15

1980 - looks at inequalities in health, which became a major source of information for sociologists

Question 16

personal documents

Answer 16

letters, diaries, photos albums, autobiographies
include personal experiences + feelings + attitudes

Question 17

Znaniecki + Thomas the polish peasant in America

Answer 17

study of migration + social change. interactionists interested in people personal experiences of events

personal meaning that show the experience of the life of someone who has migrated.
documents included 764 letters that explore experiences of people who have migrated

Question 18

historical documents

Answer 18

personal / public document created in the past
good for studying the past

• Peter Laslett used parish records in his study of family structure in pre - industrial England
• Michael Anderson used parliamentary reports of child labour + stats from 1851 census to study changes to study changes in family structure

Aries - used historical info to analyse the changes if childhood + the concept of it as socially constructed

Question 19

assessing documents

Answer 19

Scott - when assessing info of documentaries general principles same as for any sociological evidence
authentic, representativeness, and meaning

1. Authenticity- is it what it claims to be?, missing pages? e.g Hitler diaries were proven to be fakes
2. credibility- is it believable? was the author sincere? e.g politicians may write a diary that is for their own importance Thomas and Znanzinecki may have lied about how good the experience in the USA was
3. representativeness - is the information typical
   - not all documents survive are the surviving ones the typical ones
   - not all surviving documents are available for use
   person may die before diary is put in use
   - certain groups may be unrepresented e.g in the past the literate were those of power, what about the poor population????
4. meaning - may need specialist skills to understand a document e.g translation, words change meaning over time
   different sociologists may interpret differently

Question 20

advantages of documents

Answer 20

-personal documents - enable researcher to get close to social actors reality, giving insight to true meanings

• documents may be only source of information e.g studying the past
• by providing another source of data, documents may offer an extra check on results found by primary results
• cheap source of data, someone else has already gathered the info

Question 21

what is content analysis

Answer 21

method of dealing systematically with the content of documents

Question 22

how does content analysis work according to this sociologist

Answer 22

Gill - first we decide on categories we will use

next we study the source and place the characteristics in the category we have decided on

we can count the numbers in each category, comparing the difference in women’s roles

Question 23

how did Lobban use content analysis

Answer 23

she used it to identify gender roles in childrens reading schemes

Question 24

how did Tuchman use content analysis

Answer 24

to analyse televisions portrayal of women

Question 25

advantages of content analysis

Answer 25

• cheap
• usually easy to find sources of material in the form of newspapers
• useful source of objective data