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.
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.
ETHICAL
There are barely
any direct ethical
problems at all.
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.
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.