Paper short abstract:

We propose an ethnographic disguised approach in order to identify the degree and the ways by which facts are adapted to bureaucratic demands and interests.

Paper long abstract:

Back in 1963, Kitsuse and Cicourel wrote an article on the drawbacks of official statistics that, although largely forgotten nowadays, became one of the most influential articles on sociology of deviance for decades. In the article, the authors do not settle with a suspicious critique of the official data but propose a new line of research --the study of rate-producing processes by analyzing the institutional decision making in the day-to-day maintenance of statistical records. Many anthropologists have also worried about the social construction of reality through the administrative recording and coding of social facts. For instance, the anthropology of colonialism has shown how often societies adapt to the modes by which they are measured. However, some of the motives behind the rate-producing processes are hardly recognized, in part because they threat the reliability of data (Police officers don't tell about incentives for registering crimes, public schools don´t tell about budget assignments to work with difficult students, agencies do not mention the penalties for incidents or cases that do not fit the established criteria, and rarely do civic servants admit that there are different possible interpretations of the regulations followed). The ethnographic approach to the production of official statistics needs to be partially disguised, in order to catch, for instance, cases of institutional decoupling or cases of forced categorization.