Documents Flashcards
what are documents
written texts which can be personal such as diaries or other texts such as paintings or school reports
types of documents used by sociologists
Public documents
Personal documents
Historical documents
public documents
These are produced by organisations such as government departments, schools, welfare agencies, businesses and charities. It includes OFTSED reports. They can also include public enquiries such as the Black Report into inequalities in health which became a major source of information for sociologists
personal documents
These include items such as letters, diaries, photos etc. These are first-person accounts of social events and personal experiences which often include the writer’s feelings and attitudes.
study using personal documents
Thomas and Znanieck’s study of migration and social change of Polish peasants in Europe and America.
Thomas and Znanieck’s study of migration and social change of Polish peasants in Europe and America.
They used personal documents to reveal the meanings that individuals gave to their experience of migration. The documents included 764 letters bought after an advertisement in a Polish newspaper in Chicago and several autobiographies. They used the documents to reveal the meanings individuals gave to their experience of migration.
how may documents give validity
They give a valid picture of the actors meaning. They are not written with the sociologist in mind, they are more likely to be an authentic statement of their author’s views unlike interviews or questionnaires, where the respondent knows that their answers are to be used for research purposes.
who prefers documents
interprevitists
what type of data does it collect
qualitative
why may documents lack validity
John Scott points out 4 reasons why
Authenticity
Credibility
Representativeness
Meaning
Authenticity
The document can only yield valid data if it’s authentic if it is genuinely what it claims to be. Researchers cannot be certain whether it was really written by its supposed authors or whether it is a forgery. For example, the so-called Hitler diaries were proven to be fake
credibility
Is the document believable or was the author sincere? For example, politicians may write autobiographies intended for publication that produce a self-serving account of events, for example by glossing over their mistakes. It may also lack credibility if it was written long after the events it describes, when key details may have been forgotten. Thomas and Znaniecki’s Polish immigrants may have lied in their letters home about how good life in the USA was, to justify their decisions to emigrate. Stein argues that documents on the internet are often not checked for accuracy before publication
meanings
While interpretivists value documents because they give us access to their author’s meanings, there is a danger of misintepreting what the document meant to the writer and the audience, imposing instead our meaning on the data. There may be added difficulties if the document is in a foreign language or if the words have changed their meaning since it was written. Different sociologists may also interpret the same document differently. Thomas and Znaniecki admitted that the interpretations they offered in their book were not always based on the data from the documents
reliability
Positivists regard documents as unreliable sources of data. Unlike official stats on a topic, which are compiled in a standard format according to fixed criteria that allow us to compare them, documents are not standardised in this way. For example, every person’s diary is unique, complied in its own way according to the writer’s own meanings and concerns which undermines its representativeness and makes it difficult to draw generalisations from them
representativeness
Scott argues that some groups may not be represented in documents for example those with limited leisure time are unlikely to keep diaries. Not all documents survive, and not all documents are available for researchers to use. The 30-year rule prevents access to many official documents for 30 years. If classified as official secrets they may not be accessible to all, private documents like diaries may never become available
practical advantages of documents
They may be the only source of information for studying the past
They are free and cheap sources of data in large amounts as they are secondary data which saves time
practical disadvantages of documents
It is not always possible to gain access to them
Individuals and organisations create documents for their own purposes not the sociologists, therefore they may not contain answers to the kinds of questions the sociologist wishes to ask
what is the ways of dealing with contents of documents
content analysis
types of content analysis
Formal Content Analysis
Thematic analysis
formal content analysis
Although documents are usually qualitative, formal content analysis allows us to produce quantitative data from them. Gill describes how it works - say we want to measure particular aspects of a media message for example, how many female characters are portrayed as being in paid employment. First, we select a representative sample of women’s magazine stories - preferably all the stories in the five most popular magazines in the last 6 months, then we decide what categories we are going to use such as employee, full-time housewife etc. Next, we study the stories and place the characters in them into the categories we have decided upon. This is called coding, then we count up the number in each category and then compare the numbers in each category to quantify the research. We might then go on to compare the results of our content analysis with official stats for female employment to see if the media were presenting a false picture of women’s roles
who favours formal content analysis
Feminists
Positivists
positivists and formal content analysis
It is attractive to positivists because they regard it as producing objective, representative, quantitative data from which generalisations can be made. It is also a reliable method because it is easy for others to repeat and check findings which helps identify trends over time
feminists and formal content analysis
Formal content analysis has proved useful for feminists studying media representations of gender. For example, Best analysed gender roles in children’s reading schemes and found that females were portrayed in a limited range of stereotyped roles
interpretivists critic of formal content analysis
Interpretivists criticise formal content analysis for its lack of validity. They argue that simply counting up how many times something appears in a document tells us nothing about its meaning, either to its author or its audience. The method is also not as objective as positivists claim. For example, the process of drawing up categories and deciding in which one to place each case are subjective processes involving value judgements by the sociologist
thematic analysis
This is a qualitative analysis of the content of media texts used by intepretivists and feminists, It involves selecting a small number of cases for in-depth analysis. The aim is to reveal the underlying meanings that have been encoded in the documents as a way of uncovering the author’s ideological bias. For example, feminists like Walby made a thematic analysis of the ways newspapers reported rape cases.
criticisms of thematic content analysis
It does not attempt to obtain a representative sample so its findings cannot be safely generalised to a wider range of documents
There is often a tendency to select evidence that supports the sociologist hypothesis rather than seeking to falsify it, which pooper argues is unscientific
There is no proof that the meaning the sociologist gives to the document is the true one. For example, post modernists argue that there is no fixed or correct meaning to a text and that the sociologists reading of it is just one among many.
ethical problems with documents
Secondary data tends to have fewer ethical problems. However, using an organisation’s unpublished documents may raise ethical concerns. For example, if a researcher made public a school’s confidential reports on bullying, this could harm its reputation and chances of recruiting pupils (marketisation) In such cases, informed consent and anonymity may be essential. There may be an ethical defence of leaking data if it’s used for the public good.
