Documenta

Question 1

Document Evaluation (1/2)

Answer 1

•P - Personal and Public are cheap sources of ready-produced information. Historical are sometimes the only information available to study the past (making triangulation difficult). Large samples of Personal and Historical will be needed to be Representative, and Language Barriers may exist too.
•E - Issues of consent in Personal and Historical
•R - Personal not representative as it’s only 1 viewpoint (and only literate groups can write). Historical not representative as not all documents survive - the powerful were often the only writers. Public tends to be representative as agencies tend to look at wider sections of society.

Question 2

Document Evaluation (2/2)

Answer 2

•V - Can have issues with authenticity/credibility. Researcher has to interpret meaning themselves. Both reduce validity.
•E - Qualitative - hard to analyse, but more Verstehen. Though public documents may provide some Quantitative Data too.
•R - Often cannot test reliability - e.g. diaries are unique
•T - Interpretivists favour because they are valid and provide verstehen/qualitative data.
Positivists reject as they aren’t reliable, generalisable or representative.

Question 3

Document Tickboxes (factors)

Answer 3

• Authenticity - is it actually real? Is it a copy? If so, how accurate? (often with historical documents, but not always- Hitler’s Diaries)
• Credibility - does the publisher have reason/intent to deceive the reader (e.g. Nixon talking about the Watergate break-ins, the tapes being distorted on release, etc.)
• Representativeness - are the documents representative of wider society during that period or are they untypical?
• Meaning - Can we interpret the meaning of a document (language barriers etc.), was it meant to be fiction or fact (e.g. will future Sociologists think all UK schools were like Hogwarts? If not, why? War of The Worlds 1st radio production panic)
• All of these can damage validity.

Question 4

Strengths and Weaknesses of using documents

Answer 4

Strengths:
• Personal and especially public documents are often easy to obtain and don’t require as much work on the Researcher’s part as they are secondary sources
• Historical are sometimes the only information available to study the past.
• Public Documents tend to be representative as agencies tend to look at wider sections of society.
• Qualitative data provides more Verstehen
• Interpretivists favour documents because they are valid and provide verstehen/qualitative data

Weaknesses-
• Issues of consent in Personal and Historical documents
• Personal documents are not representative as it’s only 1 viewpoint (and only literate groups can write). Historical not representative as not all documents survive- and again only literate groups can write, who were historically the powerful groups.
• Can have issues with authenticity/credibility. Researches has to interpret meaning themselves. Both reduce validity.
• Qualitative data is harder to analyse
• Positivists reject as they aren’t reliable, generalisable or representative.