Secondary sources & in context

Official statistics

Practical advantages - A free source of huge amounts of data, saving time & money.
Allow for comparisons between groups, e.g, crime stats between different ethnic groups.
They are collected at regular intervals so they show trends/patterns overtime, they can be used for 'before and after' studies to show cause-and-effect relationships.
Disadvantages - The state collects statistics for its own purpose, so there may be nothing available for the topic the sociologist is interested in. Durkheim; study on suicide couldn't find o/s on the religion of those who committed suicide, it was a key element of his study.
The state may have different meanings than sociologists, e.g, poverty or truancy may be defined differently, leading to different views about how large the problem is.
Definitions change overtime, making comparisons difficult, e.g, the official definition of unemployment changed over 30 times in the 1980's.
Representativeness - Some statistics cover large areas of the population allowing for generalisations, others may be less representative but they still cover more of the populations than researchers can do by themselves, e.g, British Crime Survey.
Reliability - They are compiled in a standardised way, however collectors may make errors or the public may fill out forms incorrectly.
Marxists; soft statistics are likely to be manipulated for the purpose of the capitalist class.
Interpretevists believe they aren't valid, positivists do.

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Authenticity - If the document is what is claims to be, missing pages, if it's a copy, errors, who wrote it, all factor into it's authenticity. The 'Hitler Diaries'; were proven to be fakes.
Credibility - Is the document believable, was the author sincere? Politicians may write diaries intended for publication that inflate their own importance. Thomas & Znainecki; some Polish immigrants lied in their letters home about how good life in the USA was, to justify their decision to emigrate.
Is the document accurate? Stein; documents on the internet are often not checked for accuracy before publication.
Representativeness - Not all documents survive, are the surviving documents typical of the ones that get destroyed or lost?
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 they are classified as official secrets (diaries etc..) they may never be available, or until the author dies.
Certain groups are unrepresented, e.g, the illiterate or those with limited lesiure time are unlikely to keep diaries, the educated would be overrepresented.
Meaning - Sociologists need special skills to interpret documents, especially in different languages or if words change meaning overtime. Thomas & Znainecki; the interpretations they wrote in their book weren't always based on data from the documents.

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Advantages of documents -
Personal documents (diaries & letters) allow the researcher to get close to the social actor's reality, giving insight & achieving verstehen through detailed qualitative data.
Sometimes only documents can provide information, e.g, studying the past.
By providing another source of data, documents offer an extra check on the results obtained by primary methods.
They are a cheap source of data, because someone else has already gathered the information & they save the sociologists time.
Advantages of content analysis -
It's cheap.
It's easy to find sources of material in the form of newspapers, televisions broadcasts etc...
Positivists see it as a useful source of objective, quantitative, scientific data, because they measure particular aspects of a media message, e.g, how many times female characters are portrayed as being in paid employment. Lobban; used it to analyse gender roles in children's reading schemes.
Disadvantages -
Interpretivists argue that simply counting how many times something appears in a document tells us nothing about its meaning.

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Practical issues - The data has been published already & saves time/money.
Educational statistics allow sociologists to make comparisons between the achievements of different social groups based on ethnicity, gender & social class.
They can also make comparisons overtime, e.g, anually gathered exam results.
Governments collect statistics to measure the effectiveness of their educational policies, such as; reducing inequality of achievement, which has great relevance to sociologists.
However, there may not be statistics available on everything, e.g, the relationship between language, social class & achievement.
The meanings in statistics may be different from sociologists, e.g, government determine social class in terms of parent's job but Marxists in terms of property ownership.
May not collect statistics on pupil's social class, just whether they're entitled to FSM & those don't always show class, e.g, lower m/c large families may be entitled or only poorest w/c.
Representativeness - All state schools have to complete a census 3x a year.
Reliability - They are collected in a standardised way, however, labour started measuring school performance in terms of how many disadvantaged pupils they had, instead of conversatives who measured it purely on exam results, making it hard to draw comparisons.
Validity - Schools manipulate statistics on truancy or exclusions because of marketisation.

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Practical issues - Easily accessible because government policies emphasise parental choice, leaving information for the public to use. Gilborn; studied racism & schooling, found a wide range of documents on school policy, local authority guidelines on racism. Gerwitz; studying marketisation found school brochures & prospectesus as a free source of info.
Personal documents are difficult to access, Valerie Hey; girls that notes passed to eachother in class were not easy to obtain because they were experts at hiding it from teachers.
Teacher's personnel files & pupils' disciplinary records are confidential.
Ethical issues - Few problems, however, Hey; collected girls ntoes from desks at the end of the lesson or from the bin, meaning she didn't obtain consent.
Representativeness - Some official documents are legally required of all schools, e.g, number of racist incidents, making it representative of all schools. However, some schools may lie or not all incidents are documented.
Personal documents are less representative, Hey; collected 70 notes unsystematically.
Reliability - Documents, e.g, attendance are produced systematically so they are reliable, however, teachers may make mistakes. Content analysis is more reliable.
Validitity - Documents provide important insights into the meaning held by teachers & pupils, however researchers may interpret things differently, e.g, Hey; girls notes.

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