Official Statistics

Official Statistics

1. What are they?

   • Official statistics are quantitative data collected by national and local government or other official agencies
   • Official statistics include data relating to: births, deaths, marriages, civil partnerships, unemployment figures, education attainment data (e.g. GCSE grades) and crime figures

2. Strengths

   • Useful for evaluating social policy
   • They can often be the only data available for a specific area of study
   • Cheap and easy to collect
   • Objective and reliable, as they are usually collected under strict guidelines
   • Can cover a very long time period and cover large samples, or even the whole population (such as census information)
   • Due to the large samples, they are likely to be representative and generalisable
   • Able to make before and after assumptions of changes over time, such as the number of people marrying, infant mortality rate, or changes in academic attainment
   • Can provide useful background information and help researchers establish links between different data sets, such as the relationship between poverty and academic attainment
   • Because they are publicly available, there are unlikely to be any ethical issues

3. Weaknesses

   • Because the data is collected for administrative and policy purposes (and specifically for sociological research), classifications and definitions can vary or not be useful
   • Data produced by the state may be presented in a way to make the government look better or avoid embarrassment
   • If they are inaccurate or incomplete, they may not provide a complete picture.
   • Interpretivists claim that they are invalid because they represent social constructions; they are collected for a specific purpose (that of policy) and what is and is not collected is decided by the government