1.3.11

Official Statistics

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Official Statistics

Official statistics are quantitative data collected by national and local government or other official agencies.

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Official statistics

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

  • Useful for evaluating social policy.
  • Often, 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.
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Advantages cont.

  • Can cover a very long time span and cover large samples and 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 rates or changes in academic attainment.
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Advantages 3

  • 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.
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Disadvantages

  • Because the data is collected for administrative and policy purposes (and specifically for sociological research) classification and definitions may vary or not be useful.
  • Data produced by the state might have been presented in such a way as to make the government look better or avoid embarrassment.
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Disadvantages cont.

  • 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.

Jump to other topics

1Theory & Methods

2Education with Methods in Context

3Option 1: Culture & Identity

4Option 1: Families & Households

5Option 1: Health

6Option 1: Work, Poverty & Welfare

7Option 2: Beliefs in Society

8Option 2: Global Development

9Option 2: The Media

10Crime & Deviance

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