2. • Official Statistics- quantitative data gathered
by the government or other official bodies
e.g. Social Trends, the Census, birth/marriage
and death rates, exam results
• Government gathered to use in policy making
3. Theoretical
Positivists prefer official statistics because they
deliver large scale, representative, quantitative
data collected by reliable methods such as
questionnaires.
Interpretivists see them as socially constructed
and lacking validity, they are simple counts of
events not true representations of reality
4. Marxism
• Official Statistics are serving the interests of
capitalism
• Government statistics are politically biased and
serve the interests of the ruling class.
• Unemployment statistics are a good example.
The state has regularly changed the definition of
unemployment over the years. This therefore
reduced the numbers officially defined as
unemployed so disguising the true level of
unemployment
5. Advantages
• Cheap and available
• Can study trends over time (like Durkheim)
• Big sample, so representative
• Objective and reliable sources of data. They look
for correlations and cause and effect.
• Stats allow comparison between groups
• High in reliability- same categories are used each
time the statistics are gathered so can be
replicated
• Cover most important aspects of social life e.g.
Education, divorce, crime etc
6. Disadvantages
• Don’t always measure what they say they measure. So
lacks validity.
• Reliability- recording errors can be made
• Interpretivists say that OS are not hard facts and are
not that objective. They are social constructions and
don’t tell you about meanings or motives.
• Male Bias- OS are biased against women e.g.
Definitions of work used in the census exclude unpaid
housework
• Government collects stats for its own purposes and
not for benefit of sociologists so may be none available
7. Content Analysis
• A method of dealing systematically with the
contents of documents.
• Best used in analysis of documents produced
by the mass media e.g. TV news bulletins or
ads (usually qualitative)
• Content analysis enables sociologists to
produce quantitative data from these sources
• Deals with counting categories and comparing
to official statistics to see if media are
presenting false or stereotypical views
8. Advantages:
• Cheap
• Easy to find sources of material in the form of
newspapers, TV broadcasts etc
• Positivists see it as a useful source of
objective, quantitative, scientific data
• Interpretivists argue that simply counting up
the number of times something appears in a
document tells us nothing about its meaning
9. In Class Essay
• Examine the use of structured
interviews in sociological research
(20 marks)
10. In Context
• Can study issues on:
• Ethnicity, social class and gender
• The Curriculum
• Special Educational Needs
• Marketisation of Education (New Right)
• School attendance
• Vocational Training
• Subject Choice
