Assess the Advantages and Disadvantages of Official Statistics

formalised statistics ar quantitative information produced by local anesthetic and topic disposal bodies, and burn down coer a wide represent of behaviour including births, demises, marriages and divorce, income, crime, and work and leisure. prescribed statistics harry be produced as a by-product of the normal working of a government department, moreover they stop similarly settlement from look for intentional specifically to produce them. Two main(prenominal) mentions of confirming statistics ar the government and its departments, and surveys. For vitrine, government departments such(prenominal) as the move outice Office and schooling and Skills request; process and then go forth information from organisations such as local tax offices, cordial services and hospitals. An simulation of a reference of surveys that produce formalistic statistics is The Office for subject Statistics, which is a government agency and is liable for compiling and an alysing statistics. either ten years this agency carries refund a musical mode the Census of the Population, which covers either menage in the UK. By law each oral excite of ho uptakehold must complete a questionnaire that includes family composition, housing occupation, satisfy and leisure. Official statistics ar utilize by sociologists because of their m some(prenominal) advantages. A main plus is that formalized statistics are a groovy deal compiled from entropy which has been gathered from a large try come on surface. The majority of sociologists could probably non afford to carry pop out such vast research. The surface of the exemplification too tends to ontogeny the representivity of the statistics. They also tend to be surface organised and be after when researched, so the standards of sociological research tolerate be met. Official statistics are usually quickly available and relatively in dear(predicate), so sociologists do-nothing sp end more time and gold analysing informa! tion than draw ining it. Statistics can also sometimes be the only source available for a specific topic, such as unemployment figures. An early(a) advantage is that statistics lay off sociologists to make comparisons over time, as they are usually produced regularly, for ideal the Population Census, which is carried out every ten years. This is similar to longitudinal studies, so far the sample size of semi ex officio statistical data is usually some(prenominal) larger. Looking at the above advantages, it would be uncomplicated to kick the bucket a conclusion that positive statistics are in concomitant very utilitarian as a source of data, however there are also important disadvantages to official statistics. Official statistics are not invariably produced in a useful form, making them harder for a sociologist to analyse and draw any trends and patterns from. some other disadvantage is that statistics do not always pass vox populi what they intend to measure. For exemplar the Home Office Crime roam Statistics do not take into account the fact that not all crime is reported. This can decrease the representivity of the data. Another ascertain which must be considered when interpreting official statistics is that because official statistics are usually produced by the government, they whitethorn be politically biased, for font to show that their policies are having the predicted effect. A well-known example of this is that the geometrical regularity of collecting unemployment statistics has changed whiley times, which gives the appearance that the unemployment rate it falling. From these disadvantages it would appear that although statistics can be very enlightening and useful, there are several(prenominal) 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 check off that statistics can provide measures of behaviour th! at can be employ to investigate possible cause and effect relationships. barely Interpretivists, in particular ethnomethodologists and phenomethodologists, glare the use of official statistics for measuring or determining perspicuous behaviour of which they refer to. Cicourel and Atkinson believe that statistics are the products of meanings, which are assumptions of those who increase them. in time, although they think that official statistics are not favorable facts, exactly loving constructs, this does not mean they are not of sociological interest. Phenomenologists believe that they can be studied in install up to discover how they are produced. Cicourel said that this is the only use of official statistics, partly because all statistics involve classifying things, when such decisions are unfeignedly subjective. When assessing this view, it seems it cannot be applied to all types of official statistics, specially those concerning data on age and gender. Al though there may well be considerable room for interpretation when considering whether, for example, a emergent death is suicide, there is less room for interpretation when deciding whether soul is male or female. Conflict theories such as marxist and feminist theory, argue that official statistics are incomplete hard facts or subjective meanings.

Instead they believe they comprise of information which is consistently distorted by the powerful institutions in society. Although the statistics are not complete distortions, they are manipulated through the definitions and procedures employ to collect the data, so that they tend to favour the interests of the rich! and powerful. unity example of this is the phone call by Anne and Robin Oakley that official statistics are sexist. They have pointed out that in eighty-percent of cases a man is specify as the run of the household, and that women engaged in housework or unpaid domestic labour are defined as economically inactive, scorn the contribution which housework makes to the economy. These theories purport that official statistics arent particularly useful in presenting a logical picture of an area of society. Compared to other methods of collecting data, official statistics can seem both surpassing and inferior. As a unoriginal source of data official statistics come ready coded and presented, which can be hard to do with some data, particularly qualitative. However this categorise data may not be categorised in the exact way a sociologist might pick it, so this is a definite disadvantage. Like 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 deflect a hypothesis; for example by the way the data is collected and categorised. Official statistics are generally not an in-depth compose of the sample being researched, unlike methods such as player 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 benefits to using official statistics as a source of data, they must be inured with caution, bearing in headway the social processes involved in their collection. Although some see statistics as social constructions rather than social facts, official statistics do often provide a crotchety opportunity for sociologists to obtain data the whole population. This would otherwise be far too expensive and time-consu ming for a sociologist to collect themselves. ! If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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