Official statistics

Definition

• Govt (and govt agencies)-produced stats

• Usually to see where funding/policies needed

Topics included in official stats

• Health

• Population

• Finance

• Tourism

• Environment

• Society

• Travel

Advantage (esp for positivists)

• Hugely representative due to massive sample size, which isn’t possible, especially for organisations

• They also take great care to ensure representativeness

Hidden meanings in offical stats

• “Violent crime recorded by police on the rise”

  • Could be due to better CCTV etc. and ways to record crime, as opposed to crime itself going up

• “UK employment gone up since 2020”

  • ‘Employment’ could include 0 hours contract/temporary/part time workers

• “UK unemployment has gone down”

  • Could just be that the definition of “unemployed” has been changed (which it is… a lot)

5 practical positives

1. Free to access

2. Huge amounts of data

3. Easy to make comparisons between groups

4. Data colelcted at regular intervals

• Can see trends and patterns over time

• Cause and effect relationships can be seen

5. Can be used for the comparative method as specify different groups

2 practical negatives

1. Only the state can conduct such large-scale surveys and compel people to respond due to the cost

• Therefore, the data produced will be what serves the state, not sociologists

2. Definitions of key terms may vary from sociologist to state

• E.g. poverty, truancy

• Can lead to different views about the scale of a problem

Ethics

• Very good

  • Publicly available

  • Don’t breach personal confidences or cause harm to individuals

Validity

• :)

  • Hard stats are valid as it’s very difficult to not record a birth/death/marriage

• :(

  • If a state has specific interest or things they want to push under the rug, this will be reflected in stats

    • This means stats can be both inaccurate and incomplete, and therefore invalid

  • Soft stats are invalid

    • Soft stats = e.g. crime stats

      • Self-reported, not all crimes are reported by police, ‘dark figure of crime’ etc.

Reliability

• :)

  • Are compiled in a standardised way

    • E.g. class = occupation for govt stats

  • Census is now online and automated so removes possibility of human error on either end

• :(

  • Census coders can make errors when recording data from census forms

  • Public can fill in the census incorrectly

Views on official stats - positivists

• Seen as social facts

  • True and objective measures of the real rate of e.g. crime

• Use them to test hypothesis through the comparative method

  • Durkheim (1897) - suicide stats

Views on official stats - intepretivists

• Official stats = social constructs

  • Represent labels people give to the behaviour of others, not the behaviour itself

• Official stats ≠ valid, social facts

• Atkinson (1971)

  • Need to use qualitative methods to truly discover an issue

  • E.g. suicide stats show more about coroner labelling than actual suicide levels

Views on official stats - marxists

• Irvine (1987)

  • Official stats = ideology used to serve the means of capitalism

• State ≠ neutral

  • Instead serves the interests of the captialist class to maintain the power of the Bourgeoisie

• Official police stats

  • Used to hide the number of anti-govt demonstrations

    • Hides public opposition to capitalism

• Unemployment stats

  • Changing definition of unemployment hides true negative effects of capitalism on the W/C