Secondary sources

What are official statistics

Official statistics are quantitative data gathered by the government. They are conducted by the ONS every 10 years via a census

What are the 2 ways of collecting official statistics

Registartion such as the law to register births

Official surveys such as census data

What are the advantages of using official statistics

They are a free source of huge amounts of data

They are collected at regular intervals, so they clealry show changing patterns over time

Very representative as they survey the entire population

Very reliable as they are composed in a standardised way by trained staff, and theoretically the same results would be found if another conducted it in the same way

What are the drawbacks of official statistics

The government collects statistics for its own purpose and not for the benefit of sociologists, so data isnt tailoured to specific studies

Soft statistics arent valid, for example the police dont record all crime - dark figure. The real amount of crime in underestimated in official statistics

What view do positivists take for official statistics

Positivists such as Durkheim see statistics as social facts, true and objective facts about society. Positivists use official statistics to test their hypotheses such as Durkheim’s study on suicide

What view do interpretivists take towards official statistics

Interpretivists such as Atkinson believe that official statistic lack validity. They argue taht theu do not represent real things or ‘social facts’. Instead, the believe that official statistics are socially constructed

What view do Marxists take towards official statistics

Marxists believe that the statistics that the state produces helps maintain the ruling class’ power. For example the definition of unemployment has regularly changed in order to make it so that they unemployment rate is lower

What are public documents

Public documents are produced by organisation sycg as government departments, schools, welfare agencies, businesses and charities

What are personal documents

Include items such as letters and diaries. An example of a personal document is Anne Franks diary

What are historical documents

Historical documents are personal or public documents created in the past.

According to Scott, what are the ways that we should assess documents

Authenticity - Is the document what it claims to be? Who wrote the document?

Credibility - Is the document believable? Is it accurate?

Representativeness - Is the evidence in the document typical?

Meaning - The researcher may need specific skills to understand or translate the document

What are the advantages of documents

Source of information from the past

Very cheap source of data

High in validity