Official statistics of crime are collected by the home office which means that patterns and trends can easily be found. Positivists favour this as they believe them to be social facts. Durkheim used them in his study of suicide, he felt that society was not reducible to individuals. And he found out that there was a significant variation in rates of suicide of different populations and that they stayed remarkably consistent over time. From this he found four different types of suicide which showed why a person may have committed suicide. He concluded that suicide is not an individual act but has its roots in society. However, Interpretivists would question the usefulness of official statistics, Douglas suggested that statistical approaches into suicides like Durkheim’s ignore meanings that individuals have for committing suicide. Douglas believed that to interpret why a person had committed suicide you had to get into the ‘inner world’ of the suicide person, i.e. read their diaries and suicide notes.
Positivists argue that official statistics are useful in gaining an insight into crime as they show who, what and where. Another key strength is that patterns and trends can easily be identified and so therefore analysis is easy which allows correlations to be made. The police analyse official statistics so that they can find criminal hotspots official statistics are highly reliable.
Interpretivists would question the usefulness of official statistics, they would argue that rather than being social facts official statistics are social constructions. They argue that there is a ‘dark figure’ of crime this means that some crimes don’t appear in official statistics. Not all crimes are reported for various reasons, and even when crimes are reported they are not necessarily recorded. Official statistics can be misleading and false, there are many different reasons for this. The ‘dark figure’ of unreported or hidden crime for example, a victim of blackmail may...