OFFICIAL STATISTICS

OFFICIAL STATISTICS

1. Official statistics are quantitative data, made official by the fact they are gathered by the government or other official body.

   • Examples are the ten-yearly UK Census and anything published in Social Trends.
   • The government can use the data for policy-making or other things, such as how Ofsted can use statistics to monitor schools and colleges.
   • Can be gathered by registration (e.g. registration at birth) or by official surveys (e.g. Census, General Household survey etc.) Some other agencies will gather information in their own way.
   • It is secondary data and can be about many things:
     • Births, deaths, marriages/divorces, exam results, crime, suicide, employment, health, and more.
     • Secondary data means the primary agency's intentions may be different to the secondary sociologist's.

2. PRACTICAL

   • Official statistics save sociologists both time and money.
     • They're a FREE source of a very large amount of quantitative data.
       • Individual sociologists wouldn't be able to get that much data on their own: it would take too much time, and only the government can compel response data from that large a sample.
   • Official statistics allow comparison between many different groups over time.
     • Studies of "before and after" social events can show cause-and-effect links.
     • But some definitions change over time.
   • The data will be for that agency's purposes and not the sociologist's, so it may be difficult to find what the researcher interested in.
     • Durkheim, in his study of suicide, found there was little data available, probably because the government saw little need for it.
   • Definitions will differ between the primary and secondary agencies.
     • e.g. "poverty" may be defined in a different way, so this can lead to different interpretations of the data and what it means.

3. ETHICAL

   • There are barely any direct ethical problems at all.

4. THEORETICAL

   • Representativeness
     • • Some statistics are more representative than others.
         • Things gathered by compulsory registration that are difficult to avoid or which have little motive to be untruthful (e.g. registering at birth) are more likely to be representative.
         • Things based on smaller samples e.g. Crime Survey will be less representative.
         • But the statistics are still more representative than an individual sociologist could create themselves.
   • POSITIVISTS favour, INTERACTIONALISTS less so.
   • Reliability
     • Large numbers of people in the same survey + lots of care taken when putting together sampling procedures = possibly better when making generalisations.
     • Standard procedures are followed by trained staff.
       • Errors are not totally unavoidable however, and some are still made.
         • Some information may be omitted or mistakes may be made by the people, members of the public, who fill out the forms.
   • Validity
     • A major problem with official statistics is their validity.
     • Sometimes statistics aren't valid because they don't include everything that happened: e.g. in crime surveys, not all crimes go reported or recorded and it would be near to impossible to do so.

5. An example of official statistics is the league table system, which records information about the achievement of a cohort of a school at various levels, such as what percentage of students achieved 5+ GCSE grades as A*-C.