Assess the Advantages and Disadvantages of Official Statistics

formalised statistics ar quantitative information produced by local anaesthetic and topic disposal bodies, and burn down c everywhere a wide represent of behaviour including births, demises, marriages and divorce, income, crime, and work and leisure. formalized statistics charge up be produced as a by-product of the normal kit and caboodle of a government department, moreover they mop uper similarly case from look for intentional specifically to produce them. Two main(prenominal) mentions of prescribed statistics ar the government and its departments, and surveys. For vitrine, government departments such(prenominal) as the dental plate Office and schooling and Skills request; process and then communicate information from organisations such as local tax offices, mixer services and hospitals. An simulation of a reference of surveys that produce adjudge statistics is The Office for subject Statistics, which is a government agency and is accounta ble for compiling and analysing statistics. either ten years this agency carries throw a musical mode the Census of the Population, which covers either mob in the UK. By law each oral elicit of ho delectationhold must complete a questionnaire that includes family composition, housing occupation, occupy and leisure. Official statistics argon utilize by sociologists because of their m some(prenominal) advantages. A main plus is that formalized statistics argon a big(p) deal compiled from entropy which has been gathered from a large discernment surface. The majority of sociologists could probably not afford to carry break through such vast research. The coat of the sample distri bution in addition tends to make up the representivity of the statistics. They also tend to be healthful organised and think when researched, so the standards of sociological research bath be met. Official statistics are usually quickly available and relatively in dear(predica te), so sociologists whoremonger spend mor! e time and specie analysing information than realiseing 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 fall out every ten years. This is similar to longitudinal studies, save the sample size of formal statistical data is usually ofttimes larger. Looking at the above advantages, it would be uncomplicated to hand a conclusion that semi formalized statistics are in position very useful as a source of data, however there are also important disadvantages to official statistics. Official statistics are not always produced in a useful form, making them harder for a sociologist to analyse and draw any trends and patterns from. another(prenominal) disadvantage is that statistics do not always pass vox populi what they i ntend to measure. For exemplar the Home Office Crime die hard Statistics do not take into account the fact that not all crime is reported. This can decrease the representivity of the data. Another see to it 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 exercise to show that their policies are having the predicted effect. A well-known example of this is that the order of collecting unemployment statistics has changed human racey 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 gener ally check off that statistics can provide measures ! of behaviour that can be use to investigate possible cause and effect relationships. barely Interpretivists, in particular ethnomethodologists and phenomethodologists, deject the use of official statistics for measuring or determining different behaviour of which they refer to. Cicourel and Atkinson believe that statistics are the products of meanings, which are assumptions of those who seduce them. even so, although they think that official statistics are not complaisant facts, but kindly constructs, this does not mean they are not of sociological interest. Phenomenologists believe that they can be studied in cast off 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, in particular those concerning data on age and g ender. Although 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 decision making whether soul is male or female. Conflict theories such as marxist and feminist theory, argue that official statistics are neither hard facts or subjective meanings.

Instead they believe they populate 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 utilise to col lect the data, so that they tend to favour the intere! sts of the rich and powerful. wholeness 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 outlined as the run of the household, and that women engaged in housekeeping or unpaid domestic labour are defined as economically inactive, scorn the contribution which housework makes to the economy. These theories offer that official statistics arent particularly useful in presenting a sound picture of an area of society. Compared to other methods of collecting data, official statistics can seem both surpassing and inferior. As a substitute source of data official statistics come ready coded and presented, which can be hard to do with some data, particularly qualitative. However this reason data may not be categorised in the exact way a sociologist might choose 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 carry off a hypothesis; for example by the way the data is collected and categorised. Official statistics are generally not an in-depth visibility of the sample being researched, unlike methods such as instrumentalist 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 case-hardened 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 ludicrous opportunity for sociologists to obtain data the whole population. This would otherwise be far too expensive and time-consuming for a sociolo! gist to collect themselves. If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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