Methods in Context- Secondary sources

What topics can be studied using official statistics?

CAGE and achievement, school attendance, league tables and subject choice

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How are official statistics representative?

All schools complete a census meaning lots of information is collected about students' attendance or ethnicity. They cover every pupil, making it representative.

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How are official statistics reliable?

Official statistic include a set of categories or standards that a school must use. This allows direct comparisons with other schools and so can be replicated.

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What are the practical advantages of official statistics?

Relatively cheap and readily available. They are also up-to-date as they are changed and published annually.

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Official statistics Evaluation: How are they invalid?

Are seen as socially constructed, they are an outcome of definitions made by social actors e.g. parents.They re-define things like attendance or ability by manipulating them e.g. attendance to look better e.g. education market.

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What are the practical advantages of documents?

Easily accessible- public documents especially. They give an "official" picture of topic- more reliable.

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Documents Evaluation: What are the ethical issues?

For personal documents, informed consent is needed for use.

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Documents Evaluation: How can they unrepresentative?

If its unique, it is harder to compare with other documents like it and it could lose its authenticity.

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Documents Evaluation: How are they invalid?

As they are open to different view or insights, we can lose the true meaning of the social actor's reality. The sociologists meaning can differ to the actor's, so we don't know what they actually meant to say.

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Methods in Context- Secondary sources

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