Topic 7 Secondary sources

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  • Created by: Ali682
  • Created on: 27-03-19 21:32
Official statistics
Official statistics are quantitative data gathered by the government or other official bodies. The government collects official statistics to use in policy-making. There are two ways of collecting official statistics: registration, official surveys.
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Official statistics (2)
In addition to official statistics produced by the government, organisations and groups such as trade unions, charities, businesses and churches also produce various kinds of statistics. Both the advantages and disadvantages of official statistics
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Official statistics (3)
stem largely from the fact that they are secondary data. That is 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.
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1. Practical issues Advantages
They are a free source of huge amounts of data. Statistics allow comparisons between groups. Because official statistics are collected at regular intervals they show trends and patterns over time.
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1. Practical issues disadvantages
The government collect statistics for its own purpose and not for the benefit of sociologists. The definitions that the states use in collecting the data may be different from those that sociologists would use.
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2. Representativeness
Because official statistics often cover very large numbers and because care is taken with sampling procedures they often provide a more representative sample than surveys conducted with the limited resources available to the sociologist.
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2. Representativeness (2)
They may therefore provide a better basis for making generalisations and testing hypotheses. However some statistics are less representative than others. For example statistics gathered by compulsory registration such as birth and death statistics
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2. Representativeness (3)
or the number of of pupils in school, are likely to cover virtually all cases and therefore can be highly representative. By contrast statistics produced from Official Surveys such as the British Crime Survey may be less representative because they
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2. Representativeness (4)
are only based on a sample of the relevant population. Nonetheless, such official surveys are usually much bigger than most sociologists could carry out themselves.
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3. Reliability
Official statistics are generally seen as a reliable source of data. They are complied in a standardised way by trained staff, following set procedures. For example government statisticians compile death rates for different social classes following a
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3. Reliability (2)
standard procedure that uses the occupation recorded on each person's death certificate to identify their class. Official statistics are therefore reliable because any person properly trained will allocate a given case to the same category.
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3. Reliability (3)
However official statistics are not always wholly reliable. For example census orders may make errors or omit information when recording data from census forms or members of the public may fill in the form incorrectly.
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4. Validity: the 'dark figure'
A major problem with using official statistics is that of validity. Some hard statistics do succeed in doing this. For example statistics on the number of births, deaths, marriages and divorces generally give a very accurate picture.
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4. Validity: the 'dark figure' (2)
However soft statistics give a much less valid picture. For example police statistics do not record all crimes. Similarly educational statistics do not record all racist incidents occurring in school.
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4. Validity: the 'dark figure' (3)
Attempts have been made to compensate for the shortcoming of police statistics by using self-report or victim studies to give a more accurate picture of the amount of crime. By comparing the results with the police statistics we can see that the
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4. Validity: the 'dark figure' (4)
latter underestimate the real rate of crime and from this we can make a more accurate estimate of the extent of crime.
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5. Official statistics: facts, constructs or ideology? (Positivism)
Positivists such as Emile Durkheim (1987) see statistics as a valuable resource for sociologists. Positivists take for granted that official statistics are social facts: that is true and objective measures of the real rate of crime, suicide etc.
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5. Official statistics: facts, constructs or ideology? (Positivism) (2)
They see sociology as a science and just like natural scientists, they develop hypotheses to discover the cause of the behaviour patterns that the statistics reveal. Positivists often use official statistics to test their hypotheses.
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5. Official statistics: facts, constructs or ideology? (Positivism) (3)
For example Durkheim put forward the hypothesis that suicide is caused by a lack of social integration. Using the comparative method he argued that Protestant and Catholic religions differ in how well they integrate individuals into society.
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5. Official statistics: facts, constructs or ideology? (Interpretivism)
By contrast interpretivists such as Maxwell Atkinson (1971) regard official statistics as lacking validity. They argue that statistics do not represent real things or social facts that exist out there in the world. Instead statistics are socially
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5. Official statistics: facts, constructs or ideology? (Interpretivism) (2)
constructed- they merely represent the labels some people give to the behaviour of others. In this view suicide statistics do not represent the real rate of suicides that have actually taken place, but merely the total number of decisions made by
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5. Official statistics: facts, constructs or ideology? (Interpretivism) (3)
coroners to label some deaths as suicides. The statistics therefore tell us more about the way coroners label deaths than about the actual causes of these deaths. Rather than taking statistics at face value, therefore interpretivists argue that we
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5. Official statistics: facts, constructs or ideology? (Interpretivism) (4)
should investigate how they are socially constructed. For example Atkinson uses qualitative methods such as observing the proceedings of coroners' courts to discover how coroners reach their decisions to label some deaths as suicides, or accidents.
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Marxism
Marxists such as John Irvine (1987) take a different view. Unlike interpretivists they do not regard official statistics as merely the outcome of the labels applied by official such as coroners.
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Marxism (2)
Marxists see capitalist society as made up of two social classes in conflict with each other, the capitalist ruling class and the working class whose labour the capitalists exploit for profit. In this conflict the state is not neutral but serves the
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Marxism (3)
interests of the capitalist class. The statistics that the state produces are part of the ruling class ideology- that is a part of the ideas and values that help to maintain the capitalist class in power.
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Marxism (4)
Unemployment statistics are a good example of this process. The state has regularly changed the definition of unemployment over the years. This has almost always reduced the numbers officially defined as unemployment and its damaging effects.
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Marxism (5)
Similarly Marxists argue that official police statistics systematically underestimate the number of people taking part in demonstrations against government policies. This gives the public the impression that there is less opposition to capitalism
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Documents
The term documents refers to any written text such as personal diaries, government reports, medical reports, novels, newspapers. In fact we can also take the term to include texts such as paintings, drawings, photographs and maps.
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Public documents
Public documents are produced by organisations such as government departments, schools. Some of this output may be available for researchers to use. It includes documents such as Ofsted reports for school inspections, minutes of council meetings.
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Public documents (2)
Public documents also include the official reports of public enquiries such as the Black report (19810) into inequalities in health, which became a major source of information for sociologists.
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Personal documents
Personal documents include items such as letter, diaries, photo albums and autobiographies. These are first-person accounts of social events and personal experiences and they generally also include the writer's feelings and attitudes.
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Personal documents (2)
A famous early example of a study using personal documents is William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's (1919) The Polish Peasant in Europe and America a study of migration and social change. As interactionists they were particularly interested in
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Personal documents (3)
people's personal experiences of these events. They used personal documents to reveal the meanings that individuals gave to their experience of migration. These documents included 764 letters bought after an advertisement in a Polish newspaper.
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Personal documents (4)
Thomas and Znaniecki also used public documents such as newspaper articles and court and social work records. With these documents they were able to explore the experiences of social change of some of the thousands of people who migrated from rural
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Personal documents (5)
Poland to the USA in the early 20th century.
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Historical documents
A historical document is simply a personal or public document created in the past. If we want to study the past historical documents are usually the only source of information. The study of families and households illustrates some of the types of
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Historical documents (2)
historical documents that have been used. Peter Laslett used parish records in his study of family structure in pre-industrial in England.
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Assessing documents
As John Scott (1990) argues 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 4 criteria for evaluating documents.
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1. Authenticity
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? For example the so-called 'Hitler Diaries' were later proven to be fake.
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2. Credibility
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 letters home about how good life in the USA was.
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2. Credibility (2)
Is the document accurate? For example was the account of a riot written soon after the event or years later? Stuart Stein (2003) notes that documents on the internet are often not checked for accuracy before publication.
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3. Representativeness
Is the evidence in the document typical? If we cannot answer this question we cannot know whether it is safe to generalise from it.
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4. Meaning
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
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4. Meaning (2)
audience. Different sociologists may interpret the same document differently. Thomas later admitted that the interpretations he and Znaniecki had offered in their book were not always based on the data from the documents.
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Advantages of documents
Although documents need to be assessed carefully by the sociologist before they are used as sources of evidence, nevertheless they have several important advantages. Personal documents such as diaries and letters enable the researcher to get close to
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Advantages of documents (2)
the social actor's reality, giving insight through their richly detailed qualitative data. Sometimes documents are the only source of information. By providing another source of data documents offer an extra check on the results obtained by primary
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Advantages of documents (3)
methods. They are a cheap source of data because someone else has already gathered the information. For the same reason using existing documents saves the sociologist time.
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Content analysis
Content analysis is a method for dealing systematically with the contents of documents. It is best known for its uses in analysing documents produced by the mass media such as television news bulletins or advertisements.
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Content analysis (2)
Although such documents are usually qualitative, content analysis enables the sociologist to produce quantitative data from these sources. Ros Gill (1988) describes how content analysis works as follows. Imagine we want to measure particular aspects
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Content analysis (3)
of a media message: for example how many female characters are portrayed as being in paid employment. First we decide what categories we are going to use, such as employee, full time housewife etc. Next we study the source and place the characters in
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Content analysis (4)
it into the categories we have decided upon. We can then count up the number in each category for example to compare how often women are portrayed as full-time housewives rather than employees. We might then go on to compare the results of our
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Content analysis (5)
content analysis with the official statistics for female employment to see if the media were presenting a false or stereotypical picture of women's roles. Glenys Lobban (1974) used content analysis to analyse gender roles in children's reading
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Content analysis (6)
schemes while Gaye Tuchman (1978) used it to analyse television portrayal of women. Lobban and Tuchman both found that females were portrayed in a range of roles that was both limited and stereotyped. For example Lobban found that female characters
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Content analysis (7)
were generally portrayed playing domestic roles. Content analysis has several advantages: it is cheap, it is usually easy to find sources of material in the form of newspapers, television broadcasts.
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Official statistics (2)

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In addition to official statistics produced by the government, organisations and groups such as trade unions, charities, businesses and churches also produce various kinds of statistics. Both the advantages and disadvantages of official statistics

Card 3

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Official statistics (3)

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Card 4

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Card 5

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