QUANTITATIVE - OFFICIAL STATISTICS

QUANTITATIVE - OFFICIAL STATISTICS

1. produced by the government and similar official bodies are a major source of quantitative secondary data e.g. births, marriages and exam results

2. registration

   • e.g. law requiers parents to register births

3. offical surveys

   • such as consensus or the general household surveys

4. administrative records

   • of state agencies such as hospitals, courts and schools. these include records of illnesses, convictions and truancy

5. practical advantages

   • only the state has resources to conduct large scale surveys. but has to compel with individuals for certain data.
     • for example parents are required by law to register births
   • allows us to make comparisons between groups
   • meaning people can use them for 'before and after' studies to identify correlations between variables and suggest possible cause and effect relationships

6. practical disadvantages

   • there may not be any available on the topic we are interested in.
     • the French state does not collect data on the race, ethnicity or religion of citizens - therefore, creates no official statistics on this
   • state and sociologists try to find out different information
     • ten- year census is not always up to date.

7. positivism and statistics

   • representativeness
     • the finding can be generalised to the wider population and used to test hypothesis
   • reliability
     • will produce the same statistics for everyone

8. interpretivism and statistics

   • statistics are merely social constructs that represent the labels officials attach to people. we should actually treat te m as a topic in themselves and investigate how they are socially constructed
     • mental health statistics are only recorded by those who have gone to the doctor about it
   • soft statistics
     • less valid, created by state agencies such as health services, police, courts and schools. schools collect a 'dark figure' e.g. schools may keep a record of racist incidents, but pupils do not report every incident
   • hard statistics
     • more valid, little dispute as to how to define the categories used to collect the data. created from registration data e.g. legal requirements to register births and deaths.

9. Marxist and statistics

   • reject positivist but do not see them as merely the outcome of the labels applied by officials. instead they serve the interests of capitalism
   • ideological functions
     • the state has recently changed the its definition of unemployment which has reduced the numbers officially defined as unemployed
     • not all official statistics reflect the interests of capitalism

10. feminism and statistics

    • criticise official statistics - they are regarded as 'masculine' or patriarchal model of research. secondly, as they are created by the state which feminist regard as maintaining patriarchal oppression