SECONDARY SOURCES (Official Statistics and Documents)

Question 1

Definition of official statistics?

Answer 1

Quantitative data collected by the government or other official government bodies

Question 2

Practical issues of Official Statistics:

Answer 2

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• Free, huge amounts of data, saves time and money
• Allow for comparisons within groups
• Show patterns and trends over time

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• May not be statistics in the area the sociologists need
• Definitions may be different

Question 3

Representativeness in Official Statistics

Answer 3

• They cover large numbers of people

- Care is taken with sampling procedures so no bias

Question 4

Validity in Official Statistics

Answer 4

• Depends if they’re hard or soft statistics
• Hard- succeed in being valid
• Soft- eg. police statistics don’t record all crimes, schools don’t report all racist incidents

Question 5

Marxism view of Official Statistics;

Answer 5

• Official stats serve the interests of capitalism

Question 6

Definition of documents?

Answer 6

Refers to any written text, such as personal diaries, government reports, medical records, novels, newspapers…

Question 7

What are the three types of document?

Answer 7

1. Public Documents
2. Historical Documents
3. Personal Documents

Question 8

In what ways can we assess documents?

Answer 8

1. Authenticity
2. Credibility
3. Representativeness
4. Meaning

Question 9

What is content analysis?

Answer 9

A method for dealing systematically with the contents of documents
Step 1: Decide what categories are going to be used
Step 2: Study the source
Step 3: Count up the number in each category

Question 10

Advantages of content analysis?

Answer 10

• Cheap
• Easy to find
• Useful source of objective, quantitative and scientific data