ReviseSociology

Tag: correlations

  • Nine criticisms of the theory that school exclusions are to blame for knife crime

    Nine criticisms of the theory that school exclusions are to blame for knife crime

    Last week, senior police chiefs wrote to Theresa May arguing that there was a link between the increase in the number of formal school exclusions and ‘off-rolling’ (where heads informally get parents to withdraw their children, without them being formally recorded as ‘permanently excluded’) and an increase in knife crime. The theory is that those…

  • Evaluating the Usefulness of 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…

  • Scientific Quantitative Methodology in Sociology

    Positivists prefer to the limit themselves the study of objective ‘social facts’ and use statistical data and the comparative method to find correlations, and multivariate analysis to uncover statistically significant ‘causal’ relationships between variables and thus derive the laws of human behaviour. This post explores the Positivist approach to social research, defining and explaining all of the above…