official statistics

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what are official statistics?

  • numerical data produced by national and local government bodies
  • secondary data
  • there are official statistics on everything 
  • government departments produce a lot of official statistics 
  • regualr surveys such as the census produce a range of statistics 
  • positivists 
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reliability

whether another researcher, if repeating or replicating reseach using the same method on the same or similat group, would achieve roughly the same results 

positivists see them as unreliable as they cannot be repeated 

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validity

the extent to which the findings of research atually provides a true, genuine or authentic picture of what is being studied 

interpretivists may prefer these as they can give a valid picture of writers meanings 

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advantages

  • important for palanning and evaluating social policy 
  • frequently the only available source of data in a particular area 
  • readily available and cheap 
  • comphrehensive in coverage, sing large samples. therfore, it is representative becuase they usually use large sample sizes hat represent a large portion of the population or society
  • often cover large time span 
  • allow intergroup and international comparisons to be made 
  • free source of quantitative data 
  • collected in regualr intervals- trends and cause and effect relationships
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limitations

  • are produced by the state- means they may not be comletely accurate or not providing the complete picture (validity)
  • only around a quarter of all crime is reported to the police, and even fewer are recorded by them as offences, there is a dark number of undiscovered, unreported and unrecorded crimes (representativeness)
  • futhermore, with health statistics, not all sick people got to the doctors and not all people that persuade a doctor they are ill actually are, they may just be hypochondriacs
  • asking different people means getting different answers. sociologists repeating a questionnaire for official statistics are unlikely to get he exact same results as the origional becuase they wont be able to ask the exact same people and statistics especially concerning population, marriage, deaths and crime are constantly changing (reliability)
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positivism

  • representative 
  • reliable- census questions have chaned largely over time though 
  • they do follow standard procedure 
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interpretivism

  • statistics are social constructs, they are not the 'real rate' of anything 
  • they distinguish between hard and soft statistics. soft are those created from other things 
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marxism

  • may perform ideological functions
  • showing that things arent as bad as perceived 
  • definitions are different 
  • critics say that not every statistic is to do with capitalism
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feminism

  • created by the state- conceal inequality. housewives are economically inactive 
  • masculine approach 
  • changing definitions- a familiys class was defined by the male. now it is the persons whos name is on the rent or morgage 
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