Documents complete

• Document

  Any written text, such as personal diaries, government reports, medical records, novels, newspapers, letters, emails, blogs, web pages, parish registers, train timetables, shopping lists, bank statements - the list is almost endless. Can also include texts such as paintings, drawings, photographs, maps, sounds and images from film, television, radio and other media output
• Types of documents

  • Public documents
  • Personal documents
  • historical documents
• Public documents


  Produced by organisations such as government departments, schools, welfare agencies, businesses and charities. May include Ofsted reports, minutes of council meetings, published company accounts, records of parliamentary debates, official reports of public enquiries
• Personal documents


  Items such as letters, diaries, photo albums and autobiographies. First-person accounts of social events and personal experiences, including the writer's feelings and attitudes
• A famous early example of a study using personal documents is William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's (1918-1920) 'The Polish Peasant in Europe and America', a study of migration and social change
• Documents used by Thomas and Znaniecki

  • 764 letters bought after an advertisement in a Polish newspaper in Chicago
  • Several autobiographies
  • Newspaper articles
  • Court and social work records
• Assessing documents

  • Authenticity - is the document what it claims to be?
  • Credibility - is the document believable?
  • Representativeness - is the evidence in the document typical?
  • Meaning - what does the document actually mean to the writer and intended audience?
• Thomas and Znaniecki later admitted that the interpretations they had offered in their book were not always based on the data from the documents
• Advantages of documents

  • Personal documents provide rich, detailed qualitative data giving insight into social actors' reality
  • Documents are sometimes the only source of information, especially for studying the past
  • Documents offer an extra check on results obtained by primary methods
  • Documents are a cheap source of data as someone else has already gathered the information
• Content analysis


  A method for dealing systematically with the contents of documents, best known for use in analysing documents produced by the mass media
• How content analysis works


  1. Decide on categories to measure

  2. Study the source and place characters/content into the categories

  3. Count the number in each category

  4. Compare results to official statistics to see if the media is presenting a false or stereotyped picture
• Content analysis has several advantages: it is cheap, easy to find sources, and positivists see it as a useful source of objective, quantitative, scientific data
• Interpretivist sociologists argue that simply counting up the number of times something appears in a document tells us nothing about its meaning
• public document example

  the Black Report 1980 into inequalities in health
• historical documents 


  a personal or public document written in the past

  examples - Peter Laslett used parish records in his study of family structure in pre-industrial England
• assessing documents acronym

  CRAM

  authenticity

  representativeness

  authenticity

  meaning