Official statistics

Definition

• Govt (and govt agencies)-produced stats

Intention of official stats

• Usually to see where funding/policies needed

7 topics included in official stats

• Health

• Population

• Finance

• Tourism

• Environment

• Society

• Travel

3 examples of hidden meanings in official 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)

6 practical positives

1. Free to access

2. Huge amounts of data

3. Easy to make comparisons between groups

4. Data collected 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

6. No non-response as state can compel people to reply

3 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 and over time

• E.g. poverty, truancy

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

3. May be no stats available on what sociologist is interested in

Ethics

• Very good

  • Publicly available

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

3 theoretical positives

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

2. Reliable as compiled in a standardised way (registrations: properly trained perosn will allocate a given case to the correct category) and census is now online and automated so removes possibility of human error on either end

3. Representative as are very large scale and great care taken to ensure this

3 theoretical negatives

1. Can be invalid if a state has specific interest or things they want to push under the rug, this will be reflected in stats (inaccurate/incomplete) and soft stats can be invalid due to self-reporting, lack of police reporting, dark figure of crime etc.

2. May be unreliable as census coders can make errors when recording data from census forms or public could 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

Views on official stats - marxists - role of state (+2 examples)

• Ideological function as state ≠ neutral

  • Instead serves the interests of the capitalist class to maintain the power of the Bourgeoisie and conceal reality of capitalism

1. Official police stats

• Used to hide the number of anti-gov’t demonstrations

  • Hides public opposition to capitalism

2. Unemployment stats

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

Views on offical stats - feminists

• Quantitive survey methods patriarchal

• State maintains patriarchal oppression and official stats legitimate this

  • E.g. full-time housewives = ‘economically inactive’