Discuss official statistics with regard to how useful Essay

Depending on whether the sociologist is a positivist or an interpretivist, authorised statistics whitethorn be worthless. Positivists see official statistics as invaluable sources of quantitative information that great deal be employ to investigate cause and effect relationships, like Durkheim did when study suicide. According to positivists, official statistics ar hard, amicable facts that are separate from an individual, yet affect their behaviour. Most positivists digest the validity and reliability of official statistics.An interpretivist does not deem the same guess as a positivist. They view that they are not cadencyments of facts, and are rather societal constructions created by the meanings deal attach to behaviour. Police may attach meanings to murder or burglaries and it is the job of a sociologist to understand how those meanings are constructed. Marxists happen upon yet another(prenominal) view. They believe that official statistics are tools created by the middle class to enforce their ideology onto the proletariat. These tools can be apply to mask the true inequalities of society and capitalism.They will take note of Conservative governments switching the methods use to measure unemployment over 30 times, in most cases resulting in a fall in unemployment. Using official statistics is good for the sociologist as they cost very lesser to use whilst being readily available. Samples are besides very large and the census involves the entire universe of discourse whilst normally samples this large wouild be outside a sociologists bud choose, statistics can be used to get a large sample without costing the sociologist much.If more official statistics are collected over time, they can be used to establish relationships and trends over time. do of legislation and bills can also be metric through these large scale surveys. As statistics such(prenominal) as the census are required to be taken in every EU extremity state, internatio nal comparisons can be do. More practically than not, these statistics are the only info available. However, these statistics are ofttimes collected for administrative and beaurocratic reasons, not sociological reasons and for this reason, classifications made by governments may not be competent for sociological reasons.As these are produced by the state, they may be biased to favour a definite government to reflect success of policies. Some data may be avoided and focus on the lousy rather than the good, such as talking close social scroungezs instead of talking somewhat the number of non-domiciles. As said before, interpretivists argue that official statistics are not facts, but rather social constructions The police create crime is a view taken by some as it is lastly up to them to arrest people and make the statistics.If a nice, respectable middle class person is halt for speeding, the police may not arrest the person and let them off with a warning. If an incident is too small or trivial, it is not worth the effot of cop someone. Rape cases also go un-reported as women may find it difficult to admit to the shame and mortification of owning to it to a policeperson. If crime benefits both parties, for example, blackmail or drugs trade, this is unlikely to reported by either party. formal statistics are useful for those who have no remonstration to their use and sociologists whose budgets maybe limited. They have benefits such as being made readily available, and being twopenny and in the public domain, but they can be subject to bias (how to categorise unemployed people changed three times in the eighties, with the number dropping each time) and classifications for use with governments may have been objectionalised differently to how a sociologist would do so.