Secondary sources

2 types of official statistics

1. Registration

2. Official surveys

4 Practical advantages of official stats

• Free

• Time efficient

• Allow comparisons between groups

• They can show trends and patterns over time

Disadvantages of official stats

• Government collect stats for their own purpose and does not benefit the sociologist

• The definitions for some stats the government uses is different than a sociologists definition such as poverty or truancy

Positivists and interpretivists favour or reject official stats + sociologist

Positivists (+Durkheim) favour official stats as they cover their main goals of representiveness, reliability and generalisability, they see them as ‘social facts’.

Interpretivists (+ Atkinson) rejects them as they are not valid. Atkinson argues they are not real ‘social facts’ and are socially constructed.

Dark figure of crime

The percentage of how much crime that is not recorded as it is not reported. Therefore official stats are not 100% valid

Marxist on official stats

They see official stats are serving needs of capitalism. For example: unemployment stats - The state has regularly changed the definition of unemployment over the years. Thus disguising the true levels of unemployment.

Interpretivists and positivists favour or reject documents

Interpretivists favour them as they have validity

Positivist reject them as they do not achieve reliability, generalisability and representativeness