Interpreting Official Statistics

Interpreting Official Statisticsis an important guide to the uses and abuses of official statistics. It documents some of the ways in which statistical information has been suppressed, manipulated and misinterpreted since 1979 and looks at what can actually be learned from available data about poverty, unemployment, crime and health, and the social divisions of class, gender, ethnicity and disability. The book provides a detailed analysis of key data sets such as households below average income, administrative and survey measures of unemployment and crime, population consensus data on ethnicity, different sources of data on women and work, the relationship between class and health, safety at work and new data sources on disability. Also included is a critique of official definitions of social class and a chapter on the effects of the 1980 Rayner review on the statistical debates about appropriate institutional guarantees of statistical integrity. This essential guidewill help students of social science understand the importance of the way statistics are collected and compiled to the proper interpretation of figures.