Tag: official statistics
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Invalid Official Statistics on Volunteering?
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…
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Gender and Crime Statistics
The latest available figures are from Women and the Criminal Justice System 2019, published by the Ministry of Justice in November 2020. The figures show that women commit less crime than men, and less serious crimes than men. This is an important update for the gender and crime topic which makes up part of the…
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A-Level Sociology Official Statistics Starter (Answers)
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…
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The state of the nation
Is life in the UK getting better or worse? In this post I evaluate this question by looking at a few official statistics.
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The limitations of School Exclusion Statistics
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…
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What is the significance of the ‘increase’ in student suicides?
How doe we explain the recent increase in higher education student suicides? Are there any underlying causes, or is this just a ‘moral panic’?
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Outline and explain two practical advantages of using official statistics
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…
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Education in the UK – Key Facts and Stats
Official Statistics on schools, teachers and educational achievement provided by the United Kingdom government provide an overview of the education system. They are useful for providing an ‘introduction to the state of education in the U.K’, before embarking on the core content of any sociology of education course and providing a basis for comparing the U.K. education system…
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Official Statistics on Ethnicity and Crime
A summary of how ethnic minorities are over-represented at different stages of the criminal ‘justice’ process in England and Wales
