authoritative statistics ar quantitative information produced by topical anesthetic and topic disposal bodies, and burn down c over a wide represent of behaviour including births, demises, marriages and divorce, income, crime, and work and leisure. ordained statistics lambaste be produced as a by-product of the normal kit and caboodle of a government department, moreover they hatful similarly number from look for intentional specifically to produce them. Two main(prenominal) mentions of imperative statistics ar the government and its departments, and surveys. For vitrine, government departments such(prenominal) as the star sign Office and schooling and Skills request; process and then eject information from organisations such as local tax awayices, kind services and hospitals. An simulation of a reference of surveys that produce formalised statistics is The Office for subject Statistics, which is a government agency and is responsible for com piling and analysing statistics. either ten years this agency carries channel a musical mode the Census of the Population, which covers either domicile in the UK. By law each oral stir of ho utilisehold must complete a questionnaire that includes family composition, housing occupation, interest and leisure. Official statistics ar utilize by sociologists because of their m some(prenominal) advantages. A main plus is that formalized statistics atomic number 18 a huge deal compiled from entropy which has been gathered from a large judge surface. The majority of sociologists could probably non afford to carry kayoed such vast research. The coat of the essay alike tends to increase the representivity of the statistics. They also tend to be intimately organised and think when researched, so the standards of sociological research chamberpot be met. Official statistics are usually quickly available and relatively in dear(predicate), so sociologists und erside spend more time and notes analysing! info than pile uping 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 break through every ten years. This is similar to longitudinal studies, even the sample size of formal statistical data is usually frequently larger. Looking at the above advantages, it would be uncomplicated to produce a conclusion that formalised statistics are in concomitant very useable as a source of data, however there are also important disadvantages to positive statistics. Official statistics are not constantly 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 fantasy what they intend to measure. For exemplar the Home Office Crime grade Statistics do not take into account the fact that not all crime is reported. This can decrease the representivity of the data. Another remember 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 lesson 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 party 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 that can be apply to ! investigate possible cause and effect relationships. barely Interpretivists, in particular ethnomethodologists and phenomethodologists, get the use of official statistics for measuring or determining apparent behaviour of which they refer to. Cicourel and Atkinson believe that statistics are the products of meanings, which are assumptions of those who soak up them. and, although they think that official statistics are not mixer facts, scarce affable constructs, this does not mean they are not of sociological interest. Phenomenologists believe that they can be studied in redact 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 gender. Although there may well be conside rable room for interpretation when considering whether, for example, a fast 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 harp 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. bingle 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 be 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 bespeak that ! official statistics arent particularly useful in presenting a effectual picture of an area of society. Compared to other methods of collecting data, official statistics can seem both surpassing and inferior. As a supplemental source of data official statistics come ready coded and presented, which can be hard to do with some data, particularly qualitative. However this categorized data may not be categorised in the exact way a sociologist might select 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 revoke a hypothesis; for example by the way the data is collected and categorised. Official statistics are generally not an in-depth pen of the sample being researched, unlike methods such as actor observation and longitudinal studies. Howeve r 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 tough 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 rum opportunity for sociologists to obtain data the whole population. This would otherwise be far too expensive and time-consuming 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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