What are the 5 main types of secondary data?
+ examples
1) Official statistics
+ census
2) Personal documents
+ passport, birth certificate
3) Public documents
+ OFSTED reports
4) Historical documents
+ diaries
5) Mass & social media
+ newspapers & Facebook
Where do official statistics come from?
(What are hard & soft statistics?)
+ What are some reasons why Positivists love them?
- What are some critiques of them?
Government e.g CSEW & birth rates
(H= accurate & hard to manipulate
S= social construct reliant on judgement & way they are recorded)
+ quantitative, representative & patterns and trends
- dark figure (unrecorded or unreported info)
- Marxists & Feminists claim there is political bias
- not all suicides are recorded as suicides affecting suicide statistics
Strengths & Weaknesses of Official Statistics (PERVERT)?
Practical
+ limited skills
+ large amount of data
+ cheap & time efficient
- lack specificity
Ethical
+ anonymity & confidentiality
+ informed consent
+ less of an issue for vulnerable groups
- no consent w census
- no consent for how info is used
Reliability
+ repeated regularly
- concepts & definitions differ between countries
- questions may change over time
Validity
+ objective & empirical data
- dark figures
- bias
- no meanings & motives
- social desirability
- misinterpretations
Examples
+ WHO
- Police statistics
Representativeness
+ large sample
- minority groups may not be represented
Theoretical
+ Positivists like them
- Interpretivists don’t like them
What are the 4 criteria you must be aware of when analysing documents?
1) Authenticity: if it is what it claims to be & complete
2) Credibility: if it is believable, accurate & sincere
3) Representativeness: if we can generalise from it
4) Meaning: what the intention of the document is. Has it been translated & what might the implications of this be?
Examples of documents
- Anne Frank’s Diary
- Kurt Cobain’s suicide note
- Local crime statistics
- Malmesbury’s OFSTED report
Advantages & Disadvantages of content analysis?
+ easy access
+ representative
+ low cost
+ ethically sound
- time consuming
- sample may be biased
- validity can be reliant on skills & characteristics
- lack of informed consent
Advantages of secondary documents
+ cheap
+ offer an extra check on results obtained by primary methods
+ naturally occurring, genuine social artefacts (can be quite sure they have not been distorted)
+ provides validity & meanings and motives (Interpretivists)
+ without these, sociologists would be confined to a static view of social life
Disadvantages of secondary documents?
- data produced is subjective (Positivists)
- representativeness can be questioned (may be distorted and some documents may be lost over time)
- insights provided are individual not social facts
- qualitative documents are unreliable & open to interpretation which may require skills
