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Assess the usefulness of official statistics for a sociological understanding of crime Official statistics represent one of the most important secondary sources available for sociologists. Positivists heavily rely on the use of such quantitative data and believe because of its scientific appearance, official statistics have gained a status of being 'hard facts'. However they also have many disadvantages which would question the usefulness of them within sociology. There are many different examples of official statistics but an obvious one is the census and there are clear advantages for instance they are already available and easy to access providing a cheap resource which saves time aswell as money. Also they provide us with the ability to see patterns and trends and even changes over time for instance if crime rates are rising, or if they are higher in certain areas etc. As official statistics offer a wide range e.g crime statistics are...

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