Secondary sources

What are secondary resources?

These is any research or info that has been collected by another researcher.

For example government collect statistics on the number if births, marriages and deaths but it can also be more private like someones journal.

What are the two main types of secondary sources?

• Official statistics

• Documents

What are official statistics?

Official statistics are quantitative data gathered by the government or other official bodies.

The government carry out a ten yearly census of the whole UK population which is a major source of official statitistics.

The government collects official statistics to use in policy making, eg the statistics on birth help the government to plan the number of school places for the future.

What are the two ways of collecting official statistics?

• Registration- For example the law requires parents to register births

• Official surveys- such as the census or the general household survey

What are the practical advantages of official statistics?

• They are a free source of huge amounts of data. Only the state could afford to conducts large scale surveys costing millions of pounds.

• Statistics allow comparison between groups, for example we can compare birth rates across ethnic groups

• Because official statistics are collected at regular intervals they show trends and patterns over time. This means sociologist can use them for before and after studies to show cause and effect relationships.

What are the Practical issues with official statistics?

• The government collects stats for its own purpose and not for the benefit of sociologists, so there may be none available on the topic we are interested in. Durkheim found that there was no stats for suicide rates for specific religions.

• May be hard to access new data.

2. Representativeness

As 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. therefore they may be able to freely generalise their findings and test their hypothesis

3. Reliability

They are often seen as a reliable source of data.They are complied in a standardised way by trained staff.For example government compile death rates for different social classes following a standard procedure that uses the occupation recored on each persons death certificate to identify their class

H: Not always reliable people may fill census out wrong

4. Validity: The dark figure

A major problem with using official stats is that of validity. do they measure what they claim to measure.

• Hard and soft statistics- Some ‘hard’ official stats do succeed in doing this. For example statistics on the number of births and deaths, marriages usually give a very accurate picture.

• However soft statistics give a much less valid picture. For example police statistics do not record all crime.

5. Official statistics: facts, constructs or ideology?

• Positivism- positivist such as Emile Durkheim see statistics as a valuable resource for sociologist. Positivist take for granted that official stats are social facts. Positivists often use official; stats to test their hypothesis.For example Durkehiem put forward the hypothesis that suicide is caused by a lack of social integration. He found that protestants gad higher rates of suicde.

• Interpretivism- Such as Maxwell Atkinson regard official stats as lacking validity. Argue official stats do not represent real things or ‘social facts’.believe stats are socially constructed- they merely represent the labels some people give to behaviour of others.

• Marxism-John Irvine take a different view unlike interprevists they do not regard official stats as merely the outcome of the labels applied by other. They see them as serving the interests of capitalism. The state produces data that aligns with upper class ideology. Unemployment are a good example of this. The state often change the definition of unemployment so the number has reduced but this is far from the truth and this has damaging effects on the working class.

Documents

This term document refers to any written text such as personal diaries, medical reports, blogs, newspapers etc. even painting and photographs.

What are public documents?

Public documents are produced by organisations such as government departments, schools, welfare agencies etc. Some of there output is available to researchers.

What are personal documents?

Personal documents include items such as letters, diaries etc. these are first person accounts of social events and personal experiences and they generally include the writters feelings and attitudes.

for example a study using personal documents is William Thomas and Florian study of the polish peasant in Europe and America a study of migration and social change. They used personal docs to reveal meanings that individuals gave to their experience of migration, included 764 letters.

What are historical documents?

They are simply a personal or public document created in the past. For example Aries used paintings to discover child rearing techniques in the past.

How to you asses documents

John Scott believes when it comes to asses documents you need to look for auethnicty, credibility, representativeness and meaning

1. Authenticity

Is the document what it claims to be? are there any missing pages? who actually wrote it for example the ‘hitler diaries’ were later proven to be false.

2.credibility

Is the document believable?was the author sincere?

3. Representativeness

Is the evidence in the document typical?

• Not all documents survive, are the ones that did survive typical of the one that git lost or destroyed

• The 30 year rule prevents access to some official documents for 30 years.

• Certain groups unrepresented- in the part the illiterate and those with limited leisure time are unlikely to keep a diary and the better educated are therefore over represented

4. Meaning

The researcher may need special skills to understand the document. It may have to be translate from a foreign language or word may have changed over time

What are the advantages of documents?

• Personal documents such as diaries and letters enable the researcher to get close to the social actors reality giving insight through rich detailed qualititvice data

• sometimes the only source of data

• documents provide an extra check

• Cheap resource because someone has already collected this data