Secondary Resources

• Secondary resources

  disadvantage would be that it is not collected by sociologists but by official agencies for their own particular purpose which may not be the purpose the sociologist is interested in
• Secondary resources phenomenology

  Atkinson

  regard OS as lacking validity - argue statistics are socially constructed and merely represent the labels some people give to the behaviour of others

  rather than taking statistics at face value, Interpretivists argue we should investigate how they are socially constructed
• Secondary resources marxist view of OS

  Irvine

  see official statistics as serving the interests of capitalism

  unemployment statistics- state has regularly changed the definition of unemployment - this has almost always reduced the numbers of 'officially' defined as unemployed and thus disguising the true level
• Secondary resources problems with personal documents

  Thomas and Znaieckie's The Polish Peasant in Europe and America

  as interactionists they were particularly interested in peoples experiences of events with migration - used 764 letters

  however could misunderstand meanings
• Secondary resources extended family not dominant

  Laslett

  used parish records in his study of family structure in pre-industrial Britain - found nuclear families existed way before industrialisation - criticism of parsons fit thesis
• Secondary resources mini adults

  Aries

  used paintings of children in his study of the rise in the notion of modern childhood
• Secondary resources

  John Scott

  when we asses documents the following criteria should be used:

  1. Authenticity: is the document what it claims to be? are there any pages missing? - e.g the so-called Hitler diaries were proven to be fake
  2. Credibility: is the document believable? was the author sincere? Politicians tend to write diaries intended for publication
  3. Representativeness: is the evidence in the document typical? if we can't answer this question, we don't know whether its safe to generalise
  4. Meaning: researcher may need special skills to understand - may need to be translated, words may change meaning over time
• Secondary resources school documents

  Gillborn

  study of racism and schooling, was able to access a wide range of school documents, including school policy statements and school guidelines on anti-racism- this gave him an official picture of what was happening

  he then compared this with data from interviews and observation
• Secondary resources

  Valerie Hey

  made use of the notes girls passed to each other in class to understand their friendship patterns - however the notes were not easy to obtain
• Secondary resources

  Lobban

  examined 179 stories from 6 school readings looking for gender stereotyping - used systematic content analysis
• Secondary resources content analysis

  Gill

  describes how content analysis works

  1. first, we decide what categories we are going to use - such as employee, housewife
  2. next we study the source - TV broadcast, article etc- and place the characters in the categories
  3. we can then count the number in each category for comparisons
• Secondary resources content analysis

  Tuchman

  used content analysis to analyse TV portrayal of women - studies found that female portrayed in a range or role that were limited and stereotyped