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Secondary sources - Coggle Diagram
Secondary sources
Official Stats
- Quantitative data gathered by gov or other official bodies
- Ten-yearly census of the whole UK pop major source of official stats
- Gov collects official stats to use in policy making
Ofsted and Department for education use stats on monitor effectiveness of schools
- Two ways of collecting:
- Registration - register at birth etc
- Official surveys - Census or General Household Survey
- Organisations and groups such as trade unions, charities, businesses and churches also produce stats
Practical
Advantages:
- Free source of huge amounts of data - only state afford large scale surveys, only gov power to compel citizens to provide info
- Stats allow comparisons between groups
- Collected at regular intervals show trends and patterns over time - before and after studies to show cause and effect
Disadvantages:
- Gov collects stats for own purpose not benefit sociologists, may be none for certain topic
Durkheim suicide study - no official stats on religion of suicide victims
- Definitions state uses in collecting data may be different from sociologists - different views on scale of problem
- Definitions may change over time making comparisons difficult
Representativeness:
- Cover large numbers and care taken in sampling provide representative sample providing better basis for generalisations and hypothesis making
- Some stats less representative
Reliability:
- Compiled in standardised way by trained staff following set procedures
- Reliable in principle any properly trained will allocate given case to same category
- Not always wholly reliable - may make errors, fill forms incorrectly etc
Validity: 'dark figure'
- Hard and soft stats: Hard (birth, death, divorce etc) measure what claim to measure. Soft less valid picture - not all crimes recorded or reported
- Attempts to compensate police short comings with self-report or victim studies to give more accurate picture of crime
facts, constructs or ideology
Positivism:
- Durkheim (1897) - stats valuable resource
- Stats are social facts - true and objective measures of real rates
- Sociology as science - develop hypothesis to discover causes of patterns stats reveal
- Often use stats to test hyposthesis
Interpretivists:
- Atkinson (1971) - lack validity
- Stats don't represent real things or social facts that exist in the world but are socially constructed
- Should investigate how they are socially constructed
Marxism:
- Irvine (1987) - stats serve interests of capitalism
- Stats part of ruling class ideology - help maintain capitalist class power
- Police stats systematically underestimate number people taking part in demonstrations against gov policies - give public impression less opposition to capitalism
Documents
Public documents:
- Produced by organisations
- Official reports of public enquiries e.g. Black Report (1980)
Personal documents:
- Letters, diaries, photo albums etc- first-person accounts of social events and personal experiences - generally include writers feelings and attitudes
- Thomas and Znaniecki's (1919) The Polish Peasant in Europe and America
Historical documents:
- Personal or public document created in the past
Assessing documents:
- Scott (1990) - when it comes to assessing documentary sources, general principles same as those for any other sociological evidence - 4 criteria
Authenticity - whom, what, truth, errors
Credibility - believable, sincere
Representativeness - is it typical?
- Not all documents survive
- Not all surviving documents are available for researchers to use - 30 year rule
- Certain groups may be unrepresented - illiterate etc
Meaning - understand, translate, interpret
Advantages:
- Personal documents allow to get close to social actor's reality, insight through richly qualitative date - interpretivists favour
- Can be only source of info
- Another source of data - extra check on results obtained by primary methods
- Cheap, save time
Content Analysis
- Dealing systematically with contents of documents - analyse documents produced by mass media
- Documents usually qualitative enables producing quantitative data from sources
Gill (1988) - how it works:
- Decide what categories we are going to use
- Study the source and place the characters into categories
- Count up number in each category
- Might then compare results with official stats
Lobban (1974) - used to analyse gender roles in children's reading schemes
Tuchman (1978) - used to analyse TV portrayal of women
- Both found females portrayed in range of roles that were limited and stereotyped
Advantages:
- Cheap
- Usually easy to find sources of material in form of newpapers, TV broadcasts etc
- Positivists - useful source of objective, quantitative, scientific data
Interpretivists - counting number times something appears in a document tells you nothing about its meaning