Crime and Deviance - OCR

Do you do the PET method (practical, ethical and theoretical)?

FIRST outline what officail statistics are, and mention that they are secondary data. And give examples relating to crime such as victim or self-report surveys.

PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Quick and easy as the research has already been carried out.
Easy to gain access to, however it may only be possible to get hold of out-of-date statistics or it may cost to get access.
As it's secondary data the reliability and validity cannot be tested.

ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
None as people have given consent for this information to be collected, however some people may not want it to then be used in sociologica research. And statistics are usually anonymous so no need to worry about confidentiality.

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Favoured by positivists as they collect qunatitiave data and look to plot this data on charts or graphs to establish laws and connections.
Anti-positivists reject quantitative date as they seek to collect qualitative data to gain meaning.

CONCLUDE by saying positivists like officail statistics as it is quantitative data that can easily be used to draw correlations. But that it is difficualt to check reliability when using secondary data.

OK, hope that helps. But remember you must directly relat the answer back to crime and deviance, so mention things like people may be unlikely to report certain types of crime, people may lie as to what crimes they've committed, people may interpret terms differently (for example people may have different ideas or definitions as to what counts as 'harrassment').

Anyway, something like that. I like organising the essay into Practical, Ethical and Theoretical considerations. And you MUST keep refering to some aspect of crime and deviance with every point you make.

Hope that helps?