A researcher is analyzing official state police records from the past twenty years to investigate trends in domestic dispute incidents. Which of the following is a major methodological limitation of relying on these official statistics as a source of secondary quantitative data?
They lack representativeness because they are typically collected from very small, localized sample groups.
They may lack validity because they do not capture the "dark figure" of unreported incidents and are subject to changing recording practices over time.
They are highly unreliable because the data collection process is completely unstandardized.
They prevent the researcher from performing any longitudinal analysis or identifying long-term historical trends.
644 exam-style questions on OCR A Level Psychology Research methods and techniques. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.