Sociology-RM-Secondary Sources

Question 1

What are the two main sources of secondary data?

Answer 1

Official statistics and documents

Question 2

What are official statistics?

Answer 2

Quantitative data gathered by the government or other official bodies

Question 3

What are examples of official statistics?

Answer 3

Statistics on births, death, marriages and divorces, exam results, school exclusions, crime, suicide, unemployment and health

Question 4

What is a major source of official statistics in the UK?

Answer 4

The ten yearly Census of the whole UK population is a major source of official statistics

Question 5

Why does the government collect statistics?

Answer 5

They collect official statistics to use in policy-making. Eg statistics on birth help the government to plan number of school places for future. Similarly, Ofsted and the Department for Education use statistics on things such as exam results to monitor the effectiveness of schools and colleges

Question 6

What are two ways of collecting official statistics?

Answer 6

Registration (eg the law requires parents to register births), and official surveys (eg Census or General Household Survey)

Question 7

Apart from official statistics produced by the government, who else produce statistics?

Answer 7

Organisations and groups such as trade unions, charities, businesses and churches also produce various kinds of statistics. Eg the educational pressure group, the National Grammar Schools Association, produces statistics on the comparative performance of grammar and non-selective schools

Question 8

Where do most of the advantages/disadvantages of official statistics come from?

Answer 8

The fact they are secondary data. They are not collected by sociologists but by official agencies for their own particular purposes-which may not always be the same as those of the sociologist

Question 9

What are the evaluation points for official statistics?

Answer 9

Practical advantages, practical disadvantages, representativeness, reliability, validity (the ‘dark figure’), official statistics (facts, constructs or ideology-positivism, interpretivism, marxism)

Question 10

What are the practical advantages of official statistics?

Answer 10

Free source of lots of data (only state can afford such large scale surveys and only they have the power to compel citizens to provide information). Statistics allow comparisons between groups (crime rates, educational achievement) and because they are collected at regular intervals they show trends and patterns over time so show cause-and-effect relationships (compare divorce statistics before and after law changes)

Question 11

What are the practical disadvantages of official statistics?

Answer 11

Government collects statistics for its own purpose and not for benefit of sociologists so may be none available on the topic being researched. Definitions that the state uses in collecting the data may be different from those that the sociologist would use, also the definitions can change over time making comparisons difficult, eg the definition of unemployment changed over 30 times during 1980s and early 1990s

Question 12

How does representativeness evaluate official statistics?

Answer 12

Cover very large populations and care is taken with sampling procedures so often provide more representative sample than surveys conducted with limited resources available to sociologists, so provide a better basis for making generalisations and testing hypotheses. However, some stats are less representative than others eg some are compulsory eg birth stats so are highly representative, but stats based on a sample of the relevant population eg British Crime Survey are likely to be less representative but still usually cover a lot more people than most sociologists could cover themselves

Question 13

How does reliability evaluate official statistics?

Answer 13

Generally seen as reliable because compiled in standardised way by trained staff following set procedures. They are reliable because, in principle, any person properly trained will allocate a given case to the same category. However, official statistics are not always wholly reliable, eg census coders may make errors or omit information when recording data from census forms, or members of the public may fill in the form incorrectly

Question 14

How does validity evaluate official statistics?

Answer 14

Major problem with using official statistics is validity. ‘Hard’ official statistics succeed in measuring the thing they claim to measure eg birth, death, marriage, divorce statistics. ‘Soft’ statistics give a much less valid picture, eg police stats do not record all crimes and educational statistics do not record all racist incidents occurring in schools. Attempts have been made to compensate for shortcomings of police stats by using self-report or victim surveys, eg Crime Survey for England and Wales. By comparing results with police stats can see the stats underestimate the ‘real rate’ of crime and can make more accurate estimate of extent of crimes (only 38% of crimes revealed by survey were actually reported to the police and the police did not record all of these-dark figure)

Question 15

What does an individuals view of official statistics depend on?

Answer 15

Their theoretical perspective affects whether they seem them as useful or not

Question 16

What does positivism believe about official statistics?

Answer 16

Positivists such as Durkheim see stats as valuable resource for sociologists. Rake for granted that they are ‘social facts’ (true and objective measures of the real rate of crime, suicide etc). Sociology is a science like the natural sciences, and they develop hypotheses to discover causes of behaviour patterns the stats reveal. Positivists often use official statistics to test their hypotheses, eg Durkheim put forward hypothesis that suicide is caused by lack of social integration. Using comparative method he argued Protestant and Catholic religions differ in how well individuals are integrated into society. Using official stats, he showed Protestants had a higher suicide rate so argued the statistical evidence verified his hypothesis

Question 17

What does interpretivism believe about official statistics?

Answer 17

Interpretivists such as Atkinson regard official stats as lacking validity. They do not represent real things or ‘social facts’ that exist out there in the world. Sats are socially constructed and merely represent labels some people give to the behaviour of others. Suicide stats don’t represent ‘real rate’ of suicides but the number of decisions made by coroners to label some deaths as suicides. Therefore the stats tell us more about coroners labelling than causes of deaths. Rather than taking stats at face value, it should be investigated how they are socially constructed (topic rather than a resource eg Atkinson uses qualitative methods to discover how coroners label)

Question 18

What does marxism believe about official statistics?

Answer 18

Marxists such as Irvine do not regard official statics as merely the outcome of the labels applied by officials such as coroners. Instead they see official statistics as serving the interests of capitalism. Statistics that the state produces are part of ruling-class ideology- a part of the ideas and values that help to maintain capitalist class in power. Unemployment stats are a good example of this process. State regularly changed definition of unemployment over the years. This almost aways reduces the numbers officially defined as unemployed, disguising the true level of unemployment and its damaging effects on the working class. Argue also official police stats systematically underestimate number of people taking part in demonstrations against government policies giving public impression there is less opposition to capitalism

Question 19

What are documents?

Answer 19

Refers to any written text such as personal diaries, government reports, medical records, novels, newspapers, letters, emails, blogs, web pages, parish registers, train timetables, shopping lists, bank statements etc, and the term texts can include paintings, drawings, photographs, maps etc. Also sounds and images from film, television, radio and other media output can be included

Question 20

What are three types of documents?

Answer 20

Public, personal, and historical documents

Question 21

What are public documents?

Answer 21

Produced by organisations eg government departments, schools, welfare agencies, businesses and charities. Some documents may be available for researchers to use. Includes Ofsted reports, minutes of council meetings, published company accounts and records of parliamentary debates. Also include official reports of public enquiries such as the Black Report into inequalities in health, which became a major source of information for sociologists

Question 22

What are personal documents?

Answer 22

Include items such as letters, diaries, photo albums and autobiographies. First-person accounts of social events/personal experiences and generally include feelings and attitudes of write. Famous example is Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, a study of migration and social change. They used personal documents to reveal meanings individuals gave to their experience of migration, including 764 letters bought after an advertisement in a Polish newspaper in Chicago and several autobiographies. They also used public documents such as newspaper articles and court and social work records, to explore experiences of social change in thousands of people that migrated from rural Poland to the USA in early 20th century

Question 23

What are historical documents?

Answer 23

A personal or public document created in the past. Usually the only source of information available to study the past (except recent past where they may be people still alive that can be questioned). Study of families and households illustrates some types of historical documents that have been used, eg Laslett used parish records to study family structure in pre-industrial England, Anderson used parliamentary reports on child labour and statistical material from Census to study changes in family structures, and Ariès used child rearing manuals and paintings of children to study rise of modern notion of childhood

Question 24

What does Scott argue about documents?

Answer 24

When it comes to assessing documentary sources, the general principles are the same as those for any other type of sociological evidence. He puts forward four criteria for evaluating documents: authenticity, credibility, representativeness and meaning

Question 25

How is authenticity used to assess documents?

Answer 25

Is the document what it claims to be? Are there any missing pages, and if it is a copy, is it free from errors? Who actually wrote the document? Eg the so-called 'Hitler Diaries' were later proven to be fakes

Question 26

How is credibility used to assess documents?

Answer 26

Is the document believable? Was the author sincere? Politicians may write diaries intended for publication that inflate their own importance. Thomas and Znaniecki's Polish immigrants may have lied in their letters home about how good life was in the USA, to justify their decision to emigrate. Is the document accurate? Eg was the account of a riot written soon after the event, or years later? Stein notes that documents on the internet are often not checked for accuracy before publication

Question 27

How is representativeness used to assess documents?

Answer 27

Is the evidence in the document typical? If we cannot answer this question, we cannot know whether it is safe to generalise from it. Not all documents survive (are the surviving documents typical of the ones that get destroyed or lost?), and not all surviving documents are available for researchers to use (the 30-year rule prevents access to some official documents for 30 years and, if classified as official secrets, they may not be available at all) Private documents such as diaries may never become available, or only after the authors death. Also certain groups may be unrepresented: the illiterate and those with limited leisure time, are unlikely to keep diaries so the better educated classes are likely to be over-represented

Question 28

How is meaning used to assess documents?

Answer 28

The researcher may need special skills to understand a document. It may have to be translated from a foreign language; words may change their meaning over time. We also have to interpret what the document actually means to the writer and the intended audience. Different sociologists may interpret the same document differently. Thomas later admitted the interpretations he and Znaniecki had offered in their book were not always based on the data from the documents

Question 29

What are advantages of documents?

Answer 29

Personal documents such as diaries and letters enable the researcher to get close to the social actor's reality, giving insight through their richly detailed qualitative data. Interpretivists favour them for this reason. Sometimes documents are the only source of information, eg in studying the past. By providing another source of data, documents offer an extra check on the results obtained by primary methods. Cheap source of data, because someone else already gathered the data, for the same reason, using existing documents saves the sociologist time

Question 30

What is content analysis?

Answer 30

A method for dealing systematically with the contents of documents. Best known for its use in analysing documents produced by the mass media, such as television news bulletins or advertisements. Although such documents are usually qualitative, content analysis enables the sociolgoists to produce quantitative data from these sources

Question 31

What does Gill say about content analysis?

Answer 31

Describes how content analysis works. First decide what categories to use, then study the source and place items into the categories, then count up the number in each category. Then might compare the results with official statistics to see if the original document was presenting a false picture

Question 32

What are examples of the use of content analysis?

Answer 32

Lobban used it to analyse gender roles in children's reading schemes. Tuchman used it to analyse television's portrayal of women. Both found that females were portrayed in a range of roles that was both limited and stereotyped, eg Lobban found female characters were generally portrayed playing domestic roles

Question 33

How can content analysis be evaluated?

Answer 33

It has several advantages as it is cheap, usually easy to find sources of material eg newspapers, television broadcasts etc, and positivists see it as a useful source of objective, quantitative, scientific data. However, interpretivist sociologists argue that simply counting up the number of times something appears in a document tells us nothing about its meaning