Interpreting Official Statistics

Interpreting Official Statistics examines the official statistics produced about the current state of British society. It documents some of the ways in which information has been suppressed, manipulated and misinterpreted since 1979. And it 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. This invaluable guide is designed to help students know what figures are available, and to discover when and how politicians are misusing statistics. 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. The importance of the Labour Force Survey is reflected in discussions of its different uses. 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 guide will help students of social science understand the importance of the way statistics are collected and compiled in the proper interpretation of figures. Paul Abberley, Steve Fenton, Theo Nichols, Jackie West, Peter Townsend, all at the University of Bristol and Robert Reiner at the London School of Economics