Topic 7 - Documents

• Documents


  Secondary data created by individuals, groups and organisations, that sociologists may find useful in their research
• Types of documents


  • Personal documents (letters, diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, notes, photo collections)
  • Public documents (reports from governments, charities, businesses)
  • Historical documents (birth/death records, census, diaries)
• Documents


  • Contain mainly qualitative data that expresses the beliefs and meanings held by individuals and organisations
  • Some are contemporary, others give historical perspective
• Interpretivists


  Seek to discover the meanings that underlie our actions and this means using open-ended research methods that produce valid, qualitative data
• Interpretivists regard documents as high in validity because they are the freely expressed meanings of those who produce them
• Positivists mainly reject the use of documents because they consider that they lack reliability and representativeness
• Positivists may make use of the statistical data contained in some documents, or may convert the qualitative contents of documents into quantitative data by using content analysis
• Personal documents


  Diaries, memoirs, autobiographies and letters created by individuals for a variety of uses
• Advantages of personal documents


  • Mostly written for personal purposes, often have a fairly high degree of validity and provide a genuine insight into people's attitudes
  • Mostly cheap and save the researcher time, although accessing them is not always straightforward
• Disadvantages of personal documents


  • May have many problems that can make it difficult to evaluate their validity
  • Some groups (e.g. the illiterate) are unlikely to produce them and so their views are not represented
  • Some are created after the event with the benefit of hindsight
  • Written with an audience in mind which may affect what is recorded, and personal bias is likely to be present
• Public documents


  Produced by bodies such as government, business, the media and voluntary organisations
• Advantages of public documents


  • Often plentiful, detailed, cheap and easy to access
• Disadvantages of public documents


  • Content is likely to be selective and presented with a particular bias, as the authors are aware that the documents are publicly available
• Historical documents


  The only way in which we can study past societies, especially if there are no longer any survivors whom we could question
• Disadvantages of historical documents


  • Meaning of words changes over time, some may be lost or destroyed, giving an incomplete and unrepresentative picture of the past
• Content analysis


  Quantitative - measures the amount of coverage given to a particular issue

  Qualitative - examines the meanings attached to particular words and images
• Tests of documents


  • Authenticity - Is it genuine? Is it what it claims to be?

  Credibility - Can we believe the document and the sincerity of the author?

  Representativeness - How typical is the document of a wider social group?

  Meaning - Can we interpret the author's meanings correctly?