Official statistics

Official statistics

1. Official statistics are quantitative data gathered by official bodies, such as the Government. Examples include statistics on births, deaths, marriages, divorces, exam results, school exclusions, crime, suicide, unemployment and health. The UK has a ten-yearly census of the whole population, and this gives a major source of official statistics. Other official statistics can be found on the website of the Office for National Statistics. The Government collects such official statistics to use in policy-making. For example, birth statistics help the Government to decide how many school places will be required in the future. There are two ways of collecting official statistics: registration, such as parents being required to register their newborn babies, and official surveys, such as the census.

   • In addition to official statistics produced by the Government, organisations and groups such as trade unions, charities, businesses and churches also produce various types of statistics. Both the advantages and disadvantages of the official statistics stem largely from the fact that the statistics are secondary data; they’re collected by official agencies for particular purposes, rather than by sociologists.

2. Official statistics offer several practical advantages. They’re a free source of huge amounts of data. Only the state can afford to hold such widespread surveys. Furthermore, only the state has the power to compel citizens to provide it with information. Sociologists can make use of this information, saving time and money. Statistics allow comparisons between groups. Being collected at regular intervals, official statistics can show trends and patterns over time, meaning they can be used for ‘before and after’ studies to show cause-and- effect relationships.

   • However, official statistics offer many practical disadvantages, too. The Government collects statistics for its own purpose, rather than for the benefit of sociologists. Subsequently, there may be no data available on a particular topic that a sociologist wishes to study. The definitions used in collecting the data may be different from those that sociologists would use. If definitions change over time, this may make comparisons difficult.

3. Because official statistics often cover very large amounts of the population, and because care is taken with sampling procedures, they often provide a more representative sample than surveys conducted by sociologists with limited resources. Therefore, they may provide a better basis for making generalisations and testing hypotheses. However, some statistics are less representative than others because they are only based on a sample of the relevant population. Nonetheless, such surveys are usually much bigger than that which most sociologists could carry out themselves.

4. Official statistics are typically viewed as a reliable source of data. They’re compiled in a standardized way by trained staff, following set procedures. For example, Government statisticians compile death rates for different social classes following a standard procedure which uses the occupation recorded on each person’s death certificate to determine their class. Official statistics are therefore reliable – any person properly trained will allocate a given case to the same category. However, they are not wholly reliable; for example, census coders may make errors when recording data or simply omit information altogether, and members of the public may fill in the form incorrectly.

5. A major problem with using official statistics is that of validity. Whether they actually measure the thing they claim to measure is questionable. Statistics can be divided into two categories: hard statistics and soft statistics. Hard statistics, such as the number of births and deaths, are typically fairly valid and give a very accurate picture. However, soft statistics, such as police records, give a much less valid picture, because they don’t record all crimes. Attempts to compensate for the shortcomings of police records have been made by using self-report or victim studies to give a more accurate picture of crime. By comparing the results gained with the police statistics, we can see that the latter underestimate the true rate of crime.

6. Different sociological perspectives take different views on official statistics. Positivists see statistics as a valuable resource for sociologists. However, positivists take for granted that official statistics are ‘social facts’. They believe that sociology is a science, and they develop hypotheses to discover the causes of the behaviour patterns that the statistics show. For example, Durkheim put forward the hypothesis that suicide is caused by a lack of social integration. Using the comparative method, he argued that protestant and catholic regions differ in how well their members are integrated into society. Using official statistics on suicide, he identified that protestants had a higher suicide rate, and was therefore able to argue that this statistical evidence proved his hypothesis correct.

   • On the other end of the spectrum, interpretivists argue that official statistics lack validity. Contradicting positivists, they state that official statistics do not represent social facts, but are, in fact, socially constructed. In this view, suicide statistics don’t represent the real rate of suicides that have actually occurred, but merely the total number of decisions made by the coroner that suicide is the cause of death. Therefore, the statistics actually how us the way coroners label death. Rather than taking statistics at face value, interpretivists argue that we should investigate how they are socially constructed. For example, Atkinson uses qualitative methods, such as observing the proceedings of coroners’ courts, to discover how coroners reach their decisions to label some deaths as suicides, and others as accidents, etc.
     • Marxists see official statistics as serving the interests of capitalism. They see society as made up of two social classes, the capitalist class and the working class, who are in conflict with one another, with the former ruling over the latter and exploiting their labour for profit. Marxists argue that in this conflict, the state isn’t neutral, but serves the interests of the capitalist class. Thus, the statistics produced by the state are part of ruling-class ideology. Unemployment statistics are a good example of this process; the state has regularly changed the definition of unemployment over the years, which has almost always reduced the numbers officially defined as unemployed, thus disguising the true level of unemployment and its damaging effects on the working class.