documents

Question 1

studies

Answer 1

Ofsted reports

Anne Frank - The Diary

the black report 1980

Question 2

public documents

Answer 2

documents produced by public organisations (government, school)

The Black report 1980 - comprehensive examination of class and the health in the uk

Question 3

personal documents

Answer 3

documents created by private individuals (letters, diaries)

Question 4

historical

Answer 4

documents (both public and private) created in the past

Question 5

practical advantage of documents

Answer 5

cost - normally free and widely available

personal characteristics - you don’t normally need to have specific skills or personal traits

time - often can be done quite quickly if documents easily available

historical analysis - often the only way to study historical events

Question 6

theoretical strength of documents

Answer 6

validity - often provides very in-depth data. Letters and diaries reveal how people feel about and interpret their lives

Question 7

practical limitations of documents

Answer 7

time - can take a long time to analyse and collect - particularly historical documents

access - some official documents are kept hidden through the official secrets act

Question 8

ethical limitation of documents

Answer 8

consent/privacy - if using private documents you need to ensure informed consent and maintain privacy and confidentiality where required

Question 9

theoretical limitation of documents

Answer 9

subjective - not everyone may interpret documents the same way

representativeness - private documents may not be representative of the wider population

validity - not all private documents may be accurate and may be deliberately false

Question 10

what is content analysis

Answer 10

a process of which qualitative data is turned into quantitative data

thematic content analysis is used to uncover themes within qualitative data - it follows a similar process but the categories are more subjective and it is harder to replicate

Question 11

practical strengths of content analysis

Answer 11

cost - it is normally a very cheap process

source material - normally very easy to get relevant source material

Question 12

theoretical strengths of content analysis

Answer 12

positivism - a good way to do quantitative data, objective analysis of qualitative source material

Question 13

practical limitations of content analysis

Answer 13

time - may take a while to generate a large amount of data

Question 14

theoretical limitations of content analysis

Answer 14

validity - interpretivists argue that counting how many times something appears doesn’t help understand the meanings behind it - therefore it has a low validity

reliability - different sociologists may categorise the same data in different ways - this is particularly an issue with thematic content analysis

Question 15

positivist views on documents

Answer 15

do not generally use documents as they are prone to subjectivity when being analysed

if positivists do study documents, they are more likely to employ content analysis to quantify the data

Question 16

interpretivists views on documents

Answer 16

use documents as they provide rich, in-depth data

they are not concerned that the document may not be representative