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What are the two main sources of secondary data?
Official statistics
Documents
What are official statistics?
Quantitative data gathered by the government or other official bodies.
Why does the government collect official statistics?
To use in policy-making.
What are the two ways of collecting official statistics?
Registration
Official surveys
What are the practical advantages of official statistics? [4]
They are a free source of huge amounts of data.
They allow comparisons between groups.
They are collected at regular intervals → sociologists can see trends and patterns over time.
Sociologists can identify cause-and-effect relationships.
What are the practical disadvantages of official statistics? [3]
The government collect them for their own purpose, so there may not always be statistics available on the sociologist’s topic of interest.
The definitions used to collect the data may be different to the sociologist’s, e.g. their definition of poverty.
If definitions change over time, it makes it difficult to make comparisons.
Who struggled finding official statistics related to what they wanted to research?
Durkheim (1897): there were no statistics related to the religion of suicide victims, which was crucial for his hypothesis.
What is an example of how changes in definitions impacting official statistics?
In the 1980s, the definition of unemployment changed over 30 times.
What was the sample size of the CSEW (2014)?
50,000 people
How do positivsts view official statistics?
Positivists see statistics as a beneficial resource.
They see statistics as objective, social facts.
They often use statistics to test their hypotheses.
How do interpretivists view official statistics?
Interpretivists criticise official statistics for lacking validity.
They believe that statistics are socially constructed and based on the labels some people give to the behaviours of others.
Interpretivists believe that instead, we should study how statistics are socially constructed.
How does Atkinson (1971) criticse Durkheim's use of official statistics?
Instead, they used qualitative methods, such as observing coroners to see how they come to the decision to label a death as a suicide.
How do Marxists view official statistics?
Irvine (1987): as a Marxist, he sees official statistics as serving the interests of capitalism.
He believes that the statistics produced by the state are part of the ruling-class ideology that help maintain the power of the bourgeoisie.
Official police statistics hide the number of demonstrations against government policies to make it seem as though there is less opposition to capitalism
Who said that official statistics are created to serve the interests of capitalism?
Irvine (1987)
What are the practical issues of using official statistics to research education?
This data is published and freely available to sociologists, saving time and money.
The government collects statistics on over 30 000 primary and 4,000 secondary schools.
Educational statistics are collected regularly, allowing sociologists to make comparisons over time.
Governments gather statistics to monitor the effectiveness of educational policies, e.g. the curriculum and reducing inequality, which tend to be topics of interest to sociologists.
There still may not always be statistics relevant to a sociologist’s interests.
The state's definitions used for collecting official statistics may differ from a researcher’s definition of something.
As official statistics are secondary data they can’t tell sociologists about the interaction processes that may affect statistics.
Why are official statistics representative when researching education?
Schools often have to submit the data and this cover every pupil in the country.
AO2: What is an example of how changing definitions can lower the reliability when using official statistics to research education?
In 1988 league tables were determined purely on exam results but in 2006 the Labour government introduced Contextual Value Added (CVA) to acknowledge the level of deprivation students in a school suffer.
This turned the tables as schools with a high number of disadvantaged pupils were placed higher in the league tables.
This makes it harder for sociologists to draw comparisons over time.
Why are official statistics high in reliability?
The government imposes standard definitions and categories that all schools have to use → increases the reliability.
This allows the process to be replicated regularly.
Why may official statistics lack validity when using them to research education?
Schools may manipulate their attendance figures as re-defining poor attenders as being on study leave or work experience.
They may do this due to the pressure faced in the education market to present themselves as well as possible.
What are practical issues of using documents to research education?
Pupils produce large amounts of paper-based work so there is ample opportunity to use personal documents.
Public documents on education are easily accessible, due to the government’s emphasis on parental choice.
Personal documents are more difficult to access.
Some educational documents are confidential, e.g. pupils’ disciplinary records.
AO2: Who was able to easily obtain documents due to marketisation policies in school?
Gerwitz et al. (1995): when studying marketisation and education, found that school brochures and prospectuses were a good free resource that helped them research how schools presented themselves in the education market.
AO2: Who struggled to obtain personal documents from pupils and why?
Hey (1997): made use of the notes girls passed to each other in class to understand their friendship patters. But these notes were hard to obtain as the girls were skilled in hiding them from teachers.
What ethical issues are there when using documents to research education?
There are few ethical issues when using public documents made by schools as they have been published, so permission is not required to use them.
There are more issues with personal document.
AO2: Hey (1997): when obtaining notes from the girls, they weren’t always given freely, e.g. in one case the note was collected from a bin.
What theoretical issues are there when using documents to research education?
Some documents are legally required of all schools → high representativeness.
However, not everything that should be in that document is reported, e.g. racist incidents in schools.
Personal documents tend to be less representative.
Many public documents, e.g. attendance registers, are produced in a systematic format → high reliability.
Schools may deliberately falsify or make mistakes when completing registers → reduces the reliability as the same measure of attendance isn’t being used.
Some educational documents can be used in a way that can be replicated, e.g. content analysis.
Documents can give key insights into the meanings held by teachers and pupils → high in validity.
Documents can be interpreted differently between sociologists→ reduces the validity.
AO2: Who found that documents were better way of understanding girls' feelings compared to other research methods?
Hey (1997)
What are the three types of documents?
Public documents
Personal documents
Historical documents
What are public documents?
Documents produced by organisations such as schools, businesses, charities etc.
What is an example of an official report that is also a public document?
The Black Report (1980): looked into inequalities in health.
What is historical document?
A personal or public document created in the past.
Who used personal documents to study people's experiencesof migration?
Thomas and Znaniecki (1919)
Who used historical documents to study childhood?
Aries (1960)
Who suggested the four criteria for evaluating documents?
Scott (1990)
What four criteria does Scott (1990) suggest for evaluating documents?
Authenticity
Credibility
Representativeness
Meaning
What are the advantages of documents? [4]
Personal documents allow the researcher to get close to the social actor’s reality.
Documents are sometimes the only source of information, e.g. studying the past.
Documents can be an extra check on the results obtained through primary methods.
They are a cheap source of data that can be obtained quickly.
What are the advantages of content analysis? [3]
It’s cheap.
It’s easy to find sources to analyse.
Positivists see it as a useful source of objective and quantitative data.
How do interpretivists criticise content analysis?
Interpretivists argue that simply counting up the number of times something appears doesn’t truly tell us about its meaning.
Who used content analysis to analyse gender roles in children’s reading schemes?
Lobban (1974)
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