Documents Flashcards
Practical
✓ Cost: In general, documents can be cheaper to obtain, as somebody has already collected the information & so they may be readily available & easy to access.
✓ May be the only record available: Sometimes personal documents are the only records of a particular group or activity, especially those that operate in secrecy. E.g. diary of a religious cult member. Also when sociologists study the past, historical documents maybe the only source of information.
× Lack of control: The document has not been produced by the sociologist & so they have no control over how the material was produced. The concepts employed & their operationalisation are beyond the sociologist’s control. E.g. the definitions used may well be different from how a sociologist defines the term.
× Suitability: The document may not be totally suitable for the sociologist’s focus of study, e.g. it may only be partially relevant. Also material in the diary or document may also be illegible or missing. × Interpretation: A personal document might be hard to interpret if it is from a different culture, or era, & it could be written from a biased perspective.
Ethics
✓ Few ethical issues: One key advantage of the use of documents is they are usually in the public domain so have no issues of consent or infringing upon individuals privacy.
× Could cause public embarrassment: If personal details are disclosed from an individual’s diaries this could cause public embarrassment, e.g. when a politician reveals private thoughts about fellow MP’s.
Reliability
× Low reliability: Findings cannot be tested as there are no fixed rules of researching documents & no common agreed systems of measurement which means the data cannot be tested in a meaningful way.
Validity ++
✓ High in validity: Personal documents will be highly valid if the author writes them without any foreknowledge of their possible sociological use (e.g. diaries & letters not written with an ‘audience’ in mind).
✓ Gain an insight: A researcher can gain a better understanding of a social group – they tell about events from those ‘on the inside’, e.g. a prisoner’s diary. Also, novels give a good insight into attitudes & behaviour of particular groups at a time e.g. Dickens on 19th century poor in Britain. Documents that produce qualitative data provide a better insight into people’s lives & meanings to gain a real understanding about motives & the reasons behind their behaviour.
Validity —-
× No way of verifying the truth: It may be difficult to evaluate the accuracy & validity of a historical document as there may be no way of verifying the truth of what is written. Especially personal & historical documents are heavily dependent on people’s memories & can be prone to ‘false memory syndrome’ where information may be distorted, selective or incorrect which can reduce the validity of the information.
× Issues with authenticity: Is the document real or a fake? E.g. the Hitler Diaries were shown to have been faked during the 1980’s.
× Issues with oral history: The problem with this method is that it relies on people’s memory which is fallible & can be tainted by personal bias; they may be subjective & not an objective representation of the truth which lowers validity.
example
- Anne Frank’s ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’ (personal documents)
- The Macpherson Report (1999) – a government report by Sir William Macpherson into the racially motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence which concluded that there was institutional racism within the Metropolitan Police. (public document)
Representativeness
× Unrepresentative: Documents are often ‘one-offs’ that are unique to the person & time that they are created in. They are written from one person’s perspective who may have a narrow view of particular events. This therefore means that a sociologist would be unable to generalise from them. There is no way of knowing how representative a particular document is - some social groups leave few personal documents partly because of different literacy levels & partly as a result of the way they may see their lack of social importance. E.g. agricultural workers.
Theory
✓ Gain empathy: Personal documents are an excellent way to gather ‘verstehen’ or empathetic understanding of an individual which an interpretivist would value.
× Documents depend on the subjective interpretation of researcher: The researcher may misinterpret the document as they do not really know how something in the document was meant to be taken; e.g. something might be taken out of context, or be written in a sarcastic tone that the researcher may be unaware of. Positivists claim documents are subjective, biased & unscientific.
