ABSTRACT
With the growing refinement of official ‘book-keeping’ statistics the dividing line between them and research statistics in the narrower sense is getting more and more difficult to draw. As we have seen (Chapter 5 under ‘General Considerations’), it is no longer identical with the distinction between official and private collection of figures, although this distinction has not become entirely immaterial. Research statistics are, more often than official statistics, concerned with the solution of a specific problem; they are, therefore, but rarely published at regular intervals, and private research workers are more often than officials inclined to draw conclusions from their studies and use them as a basis and justification for critical appraisals of specific conditions and policies. Official statisticians are, naturally, reluctant to do so. This applies not only to regular official publications in the narrower sense, for example Criminal Statistics for England and Wales, where any such critical appraisals of, say, the work of the police or the courts would of course be entirely out of place, but also to official research statistics, such as, for example, the Report of the Home Office Research Unit on Time Spent Awaiting Trial 1 where certain figures are presented which could well have been used for criticisms of the police and the courts. It could be argued, however, that such criticisms should rather come from non-official quarters.
