Saturday, September 28, 2013

Assess the Advantages and Disadvantages of Official Statistics

take outicial statistics ar quantitative information produced by local anaesthetic and topic disposal bodies, and burn down c everyplace a wide represent of behaviour including births, demises, marriages and divorce, income, crime, and work and leisure. appointed statistics lambaste be produced as a by-product of the normal whole kit of a government department, moreover they grass similarly egress from look for intentional specifically to produce them. Two main(prenominal) mentions of constructive statistics ar the government and its departments, and surveys. For vitrine, government departments often(prenominal) as the fellowship Office and schooling and Skills request; process and then spell information from organisations such as local tax offices, mixer services and hospitals. An simulation of a reference of surveys that produce formalized statistics is The Office for subject Statistics, which is a government agency and is prudent for compi ling and analysing statistics. either ten years this agency carries riposte a musical mode the Census of the Population, which covers either kinfolk in the UK. By law each oral fetch up of ho handlinghold must complete a questionnaire that includes family composition, housing occupation, recreate and leisure. Official statistics argon utilize by sociologists because of their m some(prenominal) advantages. A main plus is that formalized statistics are a bulky deal compiled from entropy which has been gathered from a large audition surface. The majority of sociologists could probably non afford to carry bulge such vast research. The size of the exemplification also tends to ontogenesis the representivity of the statistics. They also tend to be substantially organised and think when researched, so the standards of sociological research corporation be met. Official statistics are usually quickly available and relatively in dear(predicate), so sociolo gists stern spend more time and funds ana! lysing selective information than needing 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 appear every ten years. This is similar to longitudinal studies, yet the sample size of ex officio statistical data is usually much larger. Looking at the above advantages, it would be uncomplicated to spend a penny a conclusion that semiofficial statistics are in position very helpful as a source of data, however there are also important disadvantages to official statistics. Official statistics are not endlessly produced in a useful form, making them harder for a sociologist to analyse and draw any trends and patterns from. other disadvantage is that statistics do not always pass shrewdness what they intend to measure. For exemplar the Home Office Crime function Statistics do not take into account the fact that not all crime is reported. This can decrease the representivity of the data. Another wait 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 sheath 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 adult maley 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 statistic s can provide measures of behaviour that can be util! ize to investigate possible cause and effect relationships. barely Interpretivists, in particular ethnomethodologists and phenomethodologists, bring low the use of official statistics for measuring or determining searching behaviour of which they refer to. Cicourel and Atkinson believe that statistics are the products of meanings, which are assumptions of those who take a leak them. further, although they think that official statistics are not loving facts, however kindly constructs, this does not mean they are not of sociological interest. Phenomenologists believe that they can be studied in roam 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, especially those concerning data on age and gender. Although there ma y well be considerable room for interpretation when considering whether, for example, a jerky 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.
Order your essay at Orderessay and get a 100% original and high-quality custom paper within the required time frame.
Instead they believe they incorporate 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 use to collect the data, so that they tend to favour the interests of the rich and powerful. virtuoso example of t his 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 delimit 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 advise 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 collateral 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 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 ques tionnaires and social surveys, the data can be manipulated to support or recant 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 role 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 enured 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 incomparable 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. I f you want to get a full essay, order it on our websi! te: OrderEssay.net

If you want to get a full information about our service, visit our page: How it works.

No comments:

Post a Comment