official statistics

official statistics

1. what are they

   • they are quantative data gathered by the government or official bodies. e.g. births, deaths and marriages.
     • the 10 yearly census is a major source of official statistics.
   • the government collect official statistics to use in policy making. e.g. stats on births help the gov to plan school places and oftsted helps to manage the effectiveness of schools.
   • there are two ways of collecting them:
     • registration
       • e.g. the law requires parents to register births
     • official surveys
       • e.g. census

2. Practical issues

   • advantages
     • they are a free source of huge amounts of data. only the state can afford to conduct large scale surveys costing millions of pounds, such as the census covering every household in the UK. also the government only has the power to compel citizens to supply it with info. e.g. requiring parents to register births .
     • statistics allow comparisons between groups e.g. we can compare educational achievement statistics, crime rates or life expectancy between classes, genders and ethnicities
     • because official statistics are collected at regular intervals, they show trends and patters overtime. this means sociologists can use them for 'before and after' studies to show cause and effect relationships. this means we can see change overtime and measure the effects of legislation.
   • disadvantages
     • the government collects statistics for its own purpose and not for the benefit of sociologists, so there may be none available on the topic we are interested in. e.g Durkheim in his study of suicide found that there were no statistics especially on the religion of suicide victims, presumably because the state has no use of the information. however, this was cruital to dukheim's hypothesis about integration and suicide
     • the definition that the state uses in collecting the data may be different from those that sociologists would use e.g.they may define poverty or truancy differently. this may lead to different views how large the problem is
     • if definitions change over time, it may make comparisons difficult. e.g. the definition of unemployment change over 30 times during the 1980's and early 1990s- so the unemployment statistics are not comparing like with like

3. representativeness

   • because official staistics often cover very large numbers, and because care is taken eith sampling and procedures, they often provide a more representative sample than surveys conducted with limited resources available to the sociologist. they may therefore provide a better basis for making generalisations and testing hypotheses
   • some statistics are less representative that others e.g. statistics gathered by compulsory reistration are likely to cover virtually all cases and are therefore highly representative
   • however, statistics produced from official surveys, such as the british crime survey are less representative because they are only based on a sample of the relevant population.
     • However, these surveys are a lot bigger than ones sociologists would usually carry out

4. reliability

   • OS are generally seen as reliable as they are compiled in a standardised way by trained staff following procedures
     • e.g. government statistics compile death rates for different social classes following a standard procedure that uses the occupation recorded on each persons death certificate to identify their class
   • official statistics are therefore reliable because, in principle any person properly trained will allocate a given case to the same category
   • however, official statistics are not always reliable e.g the census may missrecord information or make errors or members of the public may fill in information incorrectly

5. validity: the dark figure of crime

   • hard and soft statistics
     • some hard official statistics do succeed in being valid. e.g. statistics on the number of births generally give an accurate picture
     • owever, soft statistics are less valid and give a less accurate picture. e.g. police statistics do not record all crimes. also educational statistics do not record all racial incidents occuring in school
   • attempts have been made to compensate for the shortcomings of police statistics by using self-report or victim studies to give a more accurate picture of the amount of crime e.g the crime survey for england and wales asks people what crimes they have been victims of.
   • by comparing the results with police statistics we can see that the latter underestimated the real rate of crime. and from this we can make a more accurate estimation of the extend of crime e.g. in 2011 the british crime survey fiund that only 38% of the crimes revealed by the survey were reported and recorded by the police.
   • crime statistics are often unreliable due to the states of a crime becoming a statistics e.g first a crime has to be committed, it has to be witnessed, it has to be reported to the police, the police have to record it, the police have to investigate, make an arrest, charge them and then they have to appear in court and be found guilty. for al of these things there are hurdles to overcome

6. facts, constructs or ideology

   • Positivism
     • durkheim sees statistics as a valuable resource for sociologists
     • positivists take for granted that official statistics are social facts that are true and objective measures of the real rate of crime. they see sociology as a science and they develop hypotheses to discover the cause of the behaviour patterns that statistics reveal
     • they often use OSs to test their hypotheses e.g. durkheim put forward the hypotheses that suicide is caused by a lack of social integration. using the comparative method he argued that the protestant and catholic religions differ in how they integrate individuals in society. using official suicide statistics, he was able to show that protestants had a higher suicide rate. And that his hypothesis was correct
   • interpretivism
     • atkinson
       • sees OSs as lacking validity as they do not represent social facts.
     • they say that statistics are socially constructed- they represent the labels that people give to the behaviour of others
     • in this view suicide statistics do not represent the real crime rate. but merely the total number of decisions made by coroners to label someones death as suicide. the statistics therefore show us more about the way coroners label deaths than about actual causes of these deaths
     • rather than taking statistics at face value interpretivists think that we should investigate how they are socially constructed e.g. Atkinson uses qualitative methods to look as teh proceedings of coroner's courts to discover how they reach their conclusions to label a death as suicide.
   • Marxism
     • irvine
       • sees official statistics as serving the interests of capitalism
     • they see capitalist society as made up of two classes which are in conflict. the state is not neutral in this conflict but serves the capitalist class. the stats that the state produce are part of the RCI
     • unemployment statistics- the state has regularly changed the definition of unemployment. this has almost always reduced the numbers officially defined as unemployed. thus distinguishing the true level of unemployment and its damaging effect on the working class.
     • they argue that police statistics systematically underestimate the number of people taking part in demonstrations against the government policies. this gives the public the impression that there is less opposition to capitalism- no-revolution- subordination