- They are very representative; reliable; enable comparisons to be made between groups and over time; they provide information on a large scale that an individual researcher could not collect.
- Registrations, official surveys and administrative records.
- ‘Hard’ statistics are government statistics, often produced via registration and backed by a legal requirement, so they are likely to be complete. ‘Soft’ statistics are often produced by government or agencies but they are likely to be the result of individual decisions and could therefore be missing many cases that are unrecorded.
- False. Marxists see official statistics as part of the ideology supporting capitalism.
- Because the sociologist is not involved in their initial collection.
- A method used to investigate the way material is presented by the media, involving the classification of material into different categories.
- All could be used by sociologists, but the Census is a set of statistics, not a written document. All the others are documents.
- Whether a document is believable, rather than possibly containing lies, inaccuracies or exaggeration.
