SO102 Revision
Role of Statistics in Society
Statistical Data are Social and Historical Constructs
- Statistics are constructed, they are not a given
- A historical product of conventions, choices and negotiations
- The way statistics are collated (e.g. the terms used, demographics of individuals surveyed)
depends on the social conventions present at the time of data collection
- E.g. in the past unable to survey everyone in the population but now with advent of
technological advancements and the internet, able to expand the scope of sample
- Definitions that we use will be a result of social conventions, different definitions will produce
different results
- Unemployment —> could mean simply unemployed or unemployed & actively seeking a job
- Absolute poverty (Booth) versus relative poverty (Piketty)
- Guardian Article —> “India’s official poverty line doesn’t measure up”
- Poverty line was set at 26 rupees per person per day in rural areas and 32 rupees in urban
areas
- Measure was developed in the early 1970s, subsequently updated using consumer price
indices
- Recent times, economists have come up with different ways to measure extent of poverty,
official line delivers a poverty rate around 32% of the population but UNDF’s
Multidimensional Poverty Index finds proportion of the poor to be higher than 55%
- Arbitrarily drawn poverty lines —> has affected the extent to which citizens receive
subsided access to essential goods and services
- Multiple dimensions of deprivation need to be taken into consideration
- For data to exist, you need people to collate and organise them
- Date can be shaped by people’s biases
- Could change according to people who fund these projects (may choose a biased sample in
order to skew the results in favour of vested interests)
- To compute social statistics, we need to define artificial classes of things that were not obviously
comparable in the first place but that decide are going to be equal
- Alan Desrosières —> “Classes of equivalence”
- “things that hold”, accepted conventions that we act upon
- Each type of crime is different with different outcomes and motivations (e.g. petty theft and
homicide), but yet still all grouped under the category ‘crime’
- Conventions for coding data affect statistics (e.g. causes of death in medical statistics, do we
use immediate or ultimate cause?)
- Sociologists should be aware of the socially construed nature of social statistics when analysing
the data
Measurement has an Impact on Society
- Measurement and quantification are not merely descriptive operations, often have an impact on
the things that are measured
- Affects people, by making them exist in a different light (Hacking’s “making up people”), by
obliterating them (Zuckerman’s “categorical imperative”) or by making them comparable and
putting them in competition with one another (Espeland and Sauder’s “commensuration”)
Creates New Ways for People to Be
- Not merely descriptive, play a constructive function
- Creates new categories of individuals in society
- Ian Hacking —> “making up people”
- Creating kinds of people that did not exist
- People interact with them differently once they have been counted and identified in certain
manners
, SO102 Revision
- Categorisation provides order to the analysis of social realities and illuminates the relationship
between ideas and objects
- New categories previously non-existent created to “fit and enumerate people”
- “Counting is no mere report of developments. It elaborately, often philanthropically, creates
new ways for people to be”
- “Once the distinctions were made, new realities effectively came into being”
- Idea of dynamic nominalism —> the way the social world is perceived depends on the
categories we use to define and describe it
- There were’t any perverts before the 19th century, perversion was created by a new,
functional understanding of disease (perversion, as a disease and the pervert, as a diseased
person, were created in the late 19th century - Davidson)
- Opinion polls ‘make up’ people; people come to ‘fit’ the demands of the research; they become,
so to speak, people that are by nature ‘researchable’ from that perspective
- Segal
- “as soon as the category comes to exist, a new reality comes into existence”
- Reification effect of categorisation
- Examples
- GBCS —> came up with 7 different class categories, greater segmentation of the middle
class, no longer seen as a homogeneous block, draws attention to individuals that may have
been excluded in pre-existing methods of categorisation, individuals who didn’t fit into the two
polarities were placed in the middle class, without accounting for varied attributes
(“categorical imperative” —> Ezra Zuckerman, what is not counted gets discounted, some
people and/or things that do not fall neatly into any of the categories are ignored)
- Racist ideologies rooted in absurd measurements of African Americans’ head size, nose size
etc, insinuating that they were of a different species
- New categories of psychiatric disorders, inclusion of autism and ADHD, allowed for more
medical attention to be placed on these individuals (but note potential for disease mongering,
medicalisation of shyness etc)
- Census —> makes the population known (refer to Foucault —> biopower giving rise to human
sciences, creating the subject/the individual, makes them known to the state)
Shapes Social Stratification and Inequalities
- Commensuration (Espeland and Saunder)
- Turns things that are diverse in nature into things that are comparable
- Pit them against one another, shaping social classifications and relationships
- “focusing on indicators rather than on the qualities that the measures are designed to
evaluate”
- “Measures are reactive…elicit responses from people who intervene in the objects they
measure”
- “The concept (reflexivity) emphasises how people react to efforts to study them, how being
case as subjects of investigation changes the behaviours of both subjects and investigators”
- Rankings create expectations
- Small differences in rankings had a huge impact on number of applications
- Quantification often interprets and transforms social experiences into standardised quantities
that share a metric (false sense of a common ground is established)
- Hierarchy is formed, social experiences ranked against one another
- All social forms shape attention by creating patterns of exclusion and inclusion
- Crucial differences that are not easily quantified deflected
- Rankings reduce the disparate and variable characteristics that might influence the quality of
a law school
- “Believing in the universality of numbers discourages us from noticing how generative they are:
that, as numbers circulate, we recreate their meaning by building them into new contexts and
reinterpreting their meaning”
- Measurement of class
- Despite greater emphasis on social and cultural capital, hard to quantify
