documents

• Documents are written, pictorial or audio material, these are secondary sources as they have been collected, they can analyze and interpret the data for their own purposes.
• There are three types of documents:

  • Personal
  • Public
  • Historical
• Personal documents can be:

  • Letters
  • Diaries
  • Suicide notes
  • Photos
• Personal documents can be used to depict meanings, opinions, feelings and experiences.
• Public documents can come from different areas of life, such as official statistics ( government ) and mass media sources.
• Historical documents can be from public of personal past, this means they can compare trends in social change.
• Once the sociologist has their aim and hypothesis, they will need to select a sample which is representative of the of the topic to be considered.
• The researcher needs to analyze material in a systematic manner, they will categorize this data.
• Interpretivists tend to like documents as as it is classified as qualitative data, this means they take into account meaning and experiences of people , this means they are higher in validity.
• Positivists say documents are unreliable and unrepresentative, they can be quantitative data such as statistics and therefore easier to analyze. They can also convert the data if it is qualitative.
• Documents can be useful as there is a four point checklist to determine the validity of the document:

  • Authenticity
  • Credibility
  • Meaning
  • Representativeness
• Practical issues of documents is:

  • Readily available
  • Cheap and not time consuming
  • Accessibility to information that's not readily available
  • No research effect
  • Useful for large data to be drawn from
• Ethical issues of documents:

  • May not get consent from owners of documents
  • Can't get consent from historical documents
• Theoretical issues of documents:

  • Deeper insight into lives
  • Less validity due to faulty memory
  • Unrepresentativeness of individual experiences