I caught an episode of Woman’s Hour last week in which the presenter kept mentioning that according to a recent survey 62% of people in the UK had volunteered in the last week, and inviting people to discuss their experiences of voluntary work. The survey in question (excuse the pun) was the Volunteering and Charitable … Continue reading “Invalid Official Statistics on Volunteering?”
One of the supposed advantages of official statistics is that they are quick and easy to use to find out basic information. To test this out, I use the following as a starter for my ‘official statistics’ lesson with my A-level sociology students: I print the above off as a one paged hand-out and give … Continue reading “A-Level Sociology Official Statistics Starter (Answers)”
Official Statistics are a quick and cheap means of accessing data relevant to an entire population in a country. They are cheap for researchers to use because they are collected by governments, who often make them available online for free—for example, the UK Census. Marxists might point out that the fact they are free enables … Continue reading “Outline and explain two practical advantages of using official statistics”
Official Statistics are numerical data collected by governments and their agencies. This post examines a ranges of official statistics collected by the United Kingdom government and evaluates their usefulness. The aim of this post is to demonstrate one of the main strengths of official statistics – they give us a ‘snap shot’ of life in the U.K. and they … Continue reading “Evaluating the Usefulness of Official Statistics”
A summary of how ethnic minorities are over-represented at different stages of the criminal ‘justice’ process in England and Wales
How useful are official statistics for understanding differences in educational achievement by social class, gender and ethnicity? How do GCSE results vary by social class, gender and ethnicity? The data below is taken from either the Department for Education’s document – Key Stage 4 performance 2019 (Revised), or Gov.uk ‘ethnicity facts and figures‘. The later … Continue reading “Official Statistics on Educational Achievement in the U.K. – Strengths and Limitations”
The theoretical, practical and ethical strengths and limitations of official statistics in sociology.
The two main sources of official statistics on Crime in the UK (or rather England and Wales!) are: Police Recorded Crime – which is all crimes recorded by the 43 police forces in England and Wales (as well as the British Transport Police) The Crime Survey for England and Wales which is a face to … Continue reading “Official Crime Statistics for England and Wales”
The Department for Education publishes an annual report on exclusions, the latest edition published in August 2018 being ‘Permanent and fixed-period exclusions in England: 2016 to 2017. The 2018 report shows that the overall rate of permanent exclusions was 0.1 per cent of pupil enrolments in 2016/17. The number of exclusions was 7,720. The report … Continue reading “The limitations of School Exclusion Statistics”
Just a look back at what some of the official statistics and opinion polls told us about life in Britain in 2017…selected so they’re relevant to families and households, education and crime and deviance… The proportion of women aged 18 who started university in 2017 was nearly 1/3rd greater than men – 37.1% compared to … Continue reading “Britain in Statistics (2017)”
