Advantages And Disadvantages Of Official Statistics In Sociological Research Essay

formalised statistics be quantitative entropy produced by local and national government bodies, and bath unfold a wide range of behaviour including births, deaths, marriages and divorce, income, crime, and work and leisure. formal statistics can be produced as a by-product of the normal industrial plant of a government department, but they can also result from research designed specifically to produce them. Two important credits of ex officio statistics ar the government and its departments, and surveys. For example, government departments such as the Home Office and didactics and Skills request process and then publish information from organisations such as local tax offices, kindly services and hospitals.An example of a source of surveys that produce ex officio statistics is The Office for National Statistics, which is a government chest of drawers and is responsible for compiling and analysing statistics. Every ten dollar bill years this agency carries pop out t he Census of the Population, which covers every household in the UK. By law apiece head of household moldiness complete a questionnaire that includes family composition, housing occupation, channel and leisure. Official statistics atomic number 18 used by sociologists be birth of their many advantages. A main plus is that positive statistics be a lot compiled from data which has been ga in that locationd from a large exemplar size. The majority of sociologists could probably non afford to wait out such vast research.The size of the sample also tends to step-up the representivity of the statistics. They also tend to be well organised and planned when researched, so the standards of sociological research can be met. Official statistics are commonly readily available and relatively inexpensive, so sociologists can spend more than time and money analysing data than collecting it. Statistics can also sometimes be the only source available for a specific topic, such as unem ployment figures. Another advantage is that statistics allow sociologists to make comparisons over time, as they are usually produced regularly, for example the Population Census, which is carried out every ten years. This is similar to longitudinal studies, hitherto the sample size of official statistical data is usually much larger.Looking at the above advantages, it would be easy to draw a conclusion that official statistics are in fact very useful as a source of data, however there are also important disadvantages to official statistics. Official statistics are not al styles produced in a useful form, making them harder for a sociologist to analyse and draw any trends and patterns from.Another disadvantage is that statistics do not always measure what they intend to measure. For example the Home Office abomination Rates Statistics do not take into account the fact that not all crime is reported. This can decrease the representivity of the data. Another factor which must be con sidered when interpreting official statistics is that because official statistics are usually produced by the government, they may be politically biased, for example to show that their policies are having the predicted effect. A well-known example of this is that the method of collecting unemployment statistics has changed many times, which gives the appearance that the unemployment come out it falling. From these disadvantages it would appear that although statistics can be very enlightening and useful, there are several pitfalls, which cannot always be avoided.Positivists view official statistics as a potentially valuable source of quantitative data however they do recognise that statistics have several faults. They generally agree that statistics can volunteer measures of behaviour that can be used to investigate possible cause and effect relationships. However Interpretivists, in particular ethnomethodologists and phenomethodologists, reject the use of official statistics for measuring or determining certain behaviour of which they refer to. Cicourel and Atkinson call up that statistics are the products of meanings, which are assumptions of those who construct them. However, although they think that official statistics are not social facts, but social constructs, this does not mean they are not of sociological interest. Phenomenologists believe that they can be studied in do to discover how they are produced. Cicourel said that this is the only use of official statistics, part because all statistics involve classifying things, when such decisions are really subjective.When assessing this view, it pull inms it cannot be employ to all types of official statistics, especially those concerning data on age and gender. Although there may well be considerable room for interpretation when considering whether, for example, a sudden death is suicide, there is less room for interpretation when deciding whether someone is male or female. Conflict theories such as bolshy and feminist theory, argue that official statistics are neither hard facts or subjective meanings. Instead they believe they consist of information which is systematically ill-shapen by the powerful institutions in society. Although the statistics are not complete distortions, they are manipulated through the definitions and procedures used to collect the data, so that they tend to favour the interests of the rich and powerful.One example of this is the claim by Anne and Robin Oakley that official statistics are sexist. They have pointed out that in eighty-percent of cases a man is defined as the head of the household, and that women engaged in housework or unpaid domestic help labour are defined as economically inactive, despite the function which housework makes to the economy.These theories suggest that official statistics arent particularly useful in presenting a valid picture of an area of society. Compared to other methods of collecting data, official statistics can seem both superior and inferior. As a thirdhand source of data official statistics come ready coded and presented, which can be hard to do with some data, particularly qualitative. However this categorised data may not be categorised in the exact way a sociologist might prefer it, so this is a definite disadvantage. alike(p) questionnaires and social surveys, official statistics produce quantitative data, can generally cover a fairly large sample size, and are pre-coded.Again, like questionnaires and social surveys, the data can be manipulated to support or reject a hypothesis for example by the way the data is collected and categorised. Official statistics are generally not an in-depth profile of the sample being researched, impertinent methods such as participant observation and longitudinal studies. However because these studies are more in-depth, they also tend to have a smaller sample size than statistical data. To conclude, it seems that although there are many benefit s to using official statistics as a source of data, they must be treated with caution, air in mind the social processes involved in their collection. Although some see statistics as social constructions rather than social facts, official statistics do often provide a unique opportunity for sociologists to obtain data the complete population. This would otherwise be far too expensive and time-consuming for a sociologist to collect themselves.