Assess the usefulness of official statistics as a source of secondary data in sociological research.

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Assess the usefulness of official statistics as a source of secondary data in sociological research.

Official statistics are considered useful because it is high in reliability. Emile Durkheim believed suicide statistics from European countries were sufficiently reliable to establish correlations between suicide and other ‘social facts’. From the statistics, he concluded that higher level of social integration among Catholics result in lower suicide rate. It was evident that this statistical data is reliable because when he checked on differences within the population of particular countries, he found out that Bavaria, the area of Germany with the highest number of Roman Catholics, also had the lowest suicide rate. However, Atkinson has criticized the validity of suicide statistics by claiming that the commonsense theories held by coroners influence the way they categorise sudden death. For example, death by gunshot is more likely to be defined as suicide if it took place in the countryside during an organized shoot. It is possible that some suicide cases are not recorded due to the coroners wrongly assume that it is a sudden death instead of suicide. Hence, we can say that although official statistic is useful in terms of its reliability, the usefulness is flawed by its validity problem.

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Another usefulness of official statistics is they are high in objectivity. As claimed by Alan Bryman, many official statistics such as statistics on birth and death are collected as a matter of course in the everyday procedures of government agencies and are therefore relatively unobtrusive. Nevertheless, based on Ruth Levitas’ findings, official statistics are not as objective as positivists claim they are. Levitas found out that figures on public expenditure were manipulated, waiting list for NHS patients were reduced, and census statistics no longer included deaths by social class (they might reveal a growing gap between life expectancy of different ...

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