Interpreting Official Statistics (Hardcover, New)

This work 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. It also looks at what can actually be learnt from avaliable data about poverty, unemployment, crime and health, and the social divisions of class, gender, ethnicity amd disability. This guide is designed to help students know what figures are available, and to discover when and how politicians are misusing statistics. It 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.