Assess the usefulness of official statistics Essay

prescribed statistics are a source of secondary info. The government produces them. There are both hard and soft statistics. Hard statistics include birth, terminal and conjugation rates. These are registered when they occur by law, so these statistics are entirely objective. another(prenominal) type of decreed statistic is called soft statistics, e. g. umbrage statistics & unemployment figures. These might not front as objective as they first seem. They are open to role for political ends, and can be considered to have a political use.For example, the methods utilise to measure unemployment have been changed over 20 times, because not e actuallyone without a line of merchandise counts as unemployed. Official statistics are mainly used for the study of demography, inflation, crime and deviance, unemployment, poverty and self-annihilation. For an example Emile Durkheim, regarded as the founding father of sociology, used official suicide statistics for his suicide study. He used them to find cor transaction and casual relations and identified four different types of suicide, egoistic suicide, anomic suicide, altruistic suicide and fatalistic suicide.Durkheim used convinced(p)s methods to conduct his study. Positivists believe that decimal data is the most reliable method to gather information as the data is compiled in a standardised way. Douglas, an Interpretivist, would disagree with Durkheims positivist methods. He says that official statistics are not valid. To determine a death it is up to the interpretations and decisions of the coroner and that statistics are nothing more than a affable construct.Atkinson, also and Interpretivists says that it is impossible for coroners to objectively classify suicides because their decision is found on a commonsense theory of suicide which is based on whether there is a suicide note, the method of death, the location and the deceaseds life history etc. When adapting quantitative methodological procedures to derive particular data, official statistics is often used as a source of sociological evidence to simply enhance or complement practical question methods.However when looking at what is gained from the use of official statistics, it is important to agnise the limitations, which serve as a major downside to developing and attaining an unquestionable and perfect research. In addition, not all documents are easily available e. g. the ominous Report (1980) which identified inequalities in healthcare, was released in very select circumstances. not all secondary data give us a valid, sure and detailed picture of what is being measured, not just official statistics.Diaries/e-mails, it could be possible that the author lied or exaggerated about their activities Also, a document may not be reliable. Public documents are probable to be higher in terms of reliability than private documents manage letters and personal documents such as diaries and e-mails data may be fake or unrepresen tative. In conclusion, official statistics can be very useful in sociological research. Nearly all secondary data cant be trusted and official statistics might be the only appropriate form of research for your topic.