Documents

• What type of source are documents and what does this mean?

  Documents are a secondary source, so the sociologists makes use of information which has already been created.
• What are the two main types of secondary documents?

  Official statistics and documents
• Give 2 examples of public documents

  Ofsted reports and minutes from school meetings.
• Give 3 examples of personal documents

  Diaries, photo albums and autobiographies
• What is a historical document?

  It is either public or personal and was created in the past, e.g. Aries used paintings of children in his study of the development of childhood.
• What are the advantages of using documents?

  Are:

  • Personal documents allow the researcher to get close to the social actors reality - rich qualitative data.
  • Documents are sometimes the only available source of information.
  • They offer a check on results from primary methods.
  • There are cheap and save time.
• What does content analysis do, and what 3 steps are used?

  It is a method which systematically deals with the contents of a document, which turns qualitative data into quantitative data. The sociologist:

  • Decides the categories.
  • Studies the source.
  • Counts the number in each category.
• What can be done with the results of content analysis?


  Th researcher can then compare results from content analysis to official statistics.
• Scott


  There are 4 criteria or evaluating documents, which can be used as the disadvantages:

  • Authenticity - is it what it claims to be?
  • Credibility - is it believable?
  • Representativeness - is it typical?
  • Meaning - are specialist skills needed to understand it?
• Lobban


  Lobban used content analysis to analyse gender roles in children's reading schemes and found that females were portrayed in a range of roles that were both limited and stereotyped.
• What are the advantages of content analysis?

  It is cheap, easy to find sources of material (such as newspapers and TV broadcasts) and positivists see it as a useful source of objectivity, quantitative and scientific data
• Give an example of sociologists who used documents

  Thomas and Znaniecki studied migration and social change in Poland. They used personal documents (including letters bought after an advertisement in a Polish newspaper in Chicago and several autobiographies) to reveal meanings and interpretations that individuals gave to their experience of migration. They also used public documents (such as court and social work records) to explore experiences of social change from migrants.
• Who generates documents in the context of education?

  Schools, colleges, local education authorities and the DCSF (department of children, schools and families).

  Personal documents can be taken from pupils written work.
• Practical advantages


  Often easily accessible to the researcher - government policies emphasise parental choice so schools make a large amount of information available to the public. It is cost saving as it would have taken researchers a long time to compile information on racism (for example) but sociologists can access local authority guidelines on anti-racism and minutes of staff meeting etc which provide the 'official picture'.
• Practical disadvantages


  Personal documents can be harder to access. They used notes girls passed in class to understand friendship patterns, but they weren't always so easy to obtain as girls were experts at hiding them from teachers.
• Ethical


  There are few ethical concerns with public documents produced by schools as permission for their use isn't required.

  Personal documents can have ethical issues: they collected some notes from desks and from the bin (Taken by the teacher), so informed consent had not been obtained.
• Representativeness


  Some official documents are largely required from schools, such as records of racist incidents, so they are rather representative. However, not all racist incidents are reported.

  Personal documents are often less representative: they collected 70 notes, but in an unsystematic way.
• Reliability


  Public documents are produced in a systematic format, such as attendance registers, but deliberate falsifications and mistakes reduce this as their measure of attendance isn't consistent. Some educational documents can be used in ways that other researchers can replicate: Lobban's analysis of school reading schemes can be used for comparative data.
• Validity


  Provide important insights: Hey initially used interviews and observation but realised their notes provided an invaluable insight into the nature of girls' friendships as they were spontaneous expressions. However, all documents are open to different interpretations: the meanings of the notes may vary between classes and the girls may have had Hey in mind when writing them if she collected them afterwards.
• Definition - "an act of recognising and noting a fact or occurrence often involving measurement with instruments" or "a record or description so obtained".
• Observation in research:

  • Observation refers to a method in which researchers study the ongoing behaviour of their participants (or subjects). This is different from techniques such as interviews or questionnaires because observations are a study of what subjects do instead of what they say.
• Observation in research:

  • Observation is a primary research method. Primary research involves personally collecting the data or information being studied. This is the opposite of the secondary research method, where researchers choose to study data that has already been collected before their study begins.
• Types of observation in sociology:

  • Covert research = the research participants don't know who the researcher is, or that there's even a researcher there at all.
  • Overt research = the research participants are all aware of the researcher's presence and their role as an observer.
• Participant observation:

  • Researcher integrates themselves into a group to study their way of life, their culture, an how they structure their community. This technique is commonly used in ethnography (is the study of the way of life of a group or community).
• Participant observation:

  • The fact the researcher have to be integrated into the group's way of life means that they need to find a way to be let into the community. But communities don't want to be studied. So researcher can either earn the trust of certain members and seek permission to study either way of life (overt observation) or researcher can pretend to become a member of the group to gain access to information (covert observation).
• Participant observation - conducting participant observation:

  • research should focus on capturing an accurate and authentic account of the community's way of life. Means that the researcher has to avoid influencing the behaviour of anyone in the group.
  • researcher might need to ask some questions.
• Interpretivism - is one of several perspectives on how best to produce scientific knowledge, They believe that social behaviour can only be suited and explained subjectively. This is because different people, in different contexts, interpret the world in different ways.
• Participant observations - ethical concerns:

  • is important to consider the moral rights and wrong of research before we start conducting it.
  • covert participant observation involves lying to the participant - is a breach of informed consent. By becoming a part of a community, research risks their impartiality if they become attached to the group.
• Non-participant observation

  • researcher studies their subjects from the sidelines - they don't participate or integrate themselves into the lives of the group they ae studying.
• Non-participant observation - conducting non-participant observation:

  • non-participant observation can be either structured or unstructured.
  • structures non-participant observation involves some sort of observation schedule. Before beginning their observation, researchers make a list of behaviours that they expect to see.
  • unstructured observation involves the researcher freely noting down whatever they see.
• Non-participant observation - conducting non-participant observation:

  • non-participant research can be overt. This is where the subjects are aware that they are being studied.
  • can be covert, where the researcher's presence is a little more unassuming - the subjects don't know that they're being researcher.
• Non-participant observation - theoretical framework:

  • Structured non-participant observation is generally preferred in positivism.
• Positivism - is a research methodology that suggests that objective, quantitative methods are better suited to study the social world.
• Non-participant observation - theoretical framework:

  • a coding schedule makes it possible for researchers to quantify their observational findings by marking off when and how often they see particular behaviours.
• Non-participant observation - theoretical framework - example:

  • Robert Levine and Ana Norenzayan (1999) conducted a 'pace of life' study using the structured, non-participant observation method. They observed pedestrians and measured how long it took them to walk a distance of 60 feet (around 18 metres).
  • After measuring out a 60-foot distance on the street, Levine and Norenzayan simply used their stopwatches to measure how long different demographics (such as men, women, children, or people with physical disabilities) took to walk it.
• Non-participant observation - ethical concerns:

  • as with covert participant observation, subjects of covert non-participant observation aren't able to give informed consent - they are essentially deceived about the occurrence or nature of the study.
• Advantage of observational research:

  • Covert participant observation is likely to have high levels of validity because
  • participants are being studied in their natural environment, in which their behaviour won't be swayed by the known presence of a researcher.
  • Researchers can gain the trust of their participants, and get a better idea of not only what people do, but how and why they do it. This is beneficial to making assumptions by applying their own understandings to observed behaviours.
• Advantage of observational research:

  • Non-participant research is generally cheaper and quicker to do. It doesn't require time and resources for the researcher to integrate into an unfamiliar community.
  • The quantitative nature of structured observations makes it easier for researchers to make comparisons between different communities, or the same community at different times.
• Disadvantages of observational research:

  • Michael Polanyi (1958) stated that 'all observation is theory - dependent'. What he meant is, to understand what we're observing, we already need to be equipped with a certain amount of knowledge about it.
  • For example, we might not be able to make certain inferences about a table if we didn't know what a table was supposed to look like, or function as. This is an interpretivist criticism of positivist research methods - in this case, of structured observation.
• Disadvantages of observational research:

  • Observations usually involve intensively studying relatively small or specific groups. Therefore, they are likely to lack:
  • Representativeness
  • Reliability
  • Generalizability