Documents Flashcards
Definition of documents…
Information that already exists in written or audio visual format. Secondary Qualitative Data typically takes the form of documents – and there are a huge variety of them. They include government reports, newspapers, novels, letters, diaries, as well as pictures, and television and radio output.
Content of documents…
Researchers need to establish their aims and hypotheses and familiarise themselves with data so that a suitable coding system can be developed.
Once suitable codes have been identified, the researcher can then systematically re-analyse the data to identify examples of each code which could then be tallied.
Whenever content analyses are carried out, data needs to be consulted a number of times, initially to identify codes/ themes and again (as many times as required) to refine and count instances of these.
Content analysis…
Boepple and Thompson (2014) conducted quantitative analysis of 21 ‘healthy living blogs’. Their sampling frame was only blogs which had received an award, and from those, they selected the blogs with the largest number of page views.
They found that content emphasised appearance and disordered messages about food/Nutrition, with five bloggers using very negative language about being fat or overweight and four invoking admiration for being thin. They concluded that these blogs spread messages that are ‘potentially problematic’ for anyone changing their behaviour on the basis of advice contained in them.
Thematic analysis…
An alternative to content analysis which converts qualitative data into quantitative data, is to use thematic analysis.
Once data is transcribed (where necessary) data is reviewed repeatedly so that the researcher can identify trends in the meaning conveyed by language.
The themes identified are re-analysed so that they become more refined and relevant and given short hand codes. The researcher can then annotate the transcript with the codes that have been identified.
The themes identified can be used to support or challenge existing theories, with specific examples of data or quotes being used as supporting evidence.
Braun and Clarke (2006)…
Maintain that a theme should capture something important about the data in relation to your research questions, and represent some level of patterned meaning or response within the dataset.
Typically, a theme will appear more than once across the dataset but the frequency of instances of a theme or narrative within a dataset does not automatically indicate that it is more or less important than another.
Official documents…
Official Documents are produced by organisations such as government departments and their agencies as well as businesses and charities and include OFSTED and other official government enquiries. These reports are a matter of public record and should be available for anyone who wishes to see them.
Official documents include…
> Government Reports (‘public documents’)
> Company reports and accounts (‘private documents’)
Personal documents…
Personal documents are first-hand accounts of social events and personal-experiences, and they generally include the writer’s feelings and attitudes. They include such things as letters, diaries, photo albums and autobiographies.
Personal documents include:
> letters (including suicide notes)
> diaries, blogs and vlogs
> Individual Social media profiles
> Graffiti
> autobiographies
Plummer (1982) illustrates this diversity when he says: “people keep diaries, send letters, take photos, write memo’s, tell biographies, scrawl graffiti, publish memoirs, write letters to the papers, leave suicide notes, inscribe memorials on tombstones, shoot films, paint pictures, make music and try to record their personal dreams.
Media output of documents…
> The News (and ‘Fake News)
> Various websites
What about websites?…
Following Scott’s (1990) four criteria of assessing the quality of documents, we need consider why a web site is constructed in the first place, whether it is there for commercial purposes, and whether it has a political motive.
4 criteria for using websites…
1) Finding websites search engines only ever provides a selection of available web sites on a topic, and the sample they provide will be biased according to algorithm the engine uses to find its websites.
2) Related to the above point, a search is only as good as the key words the researcher inputs into the search engines, and it could be time consuming to try out all possible words and combinations.
3) New web sites are continually appearing while old ones disappear. This means that by the time research is published, they may be based on web sites which no longer exist and may not be applicable to the new ones which have emerged.
4) New approaches are being developed at a rapid rate. Some draw on traditional ways of interpreting documents such as discourse analysis and qualitative content analysis, others have been developed specifically in relation to the Web, such as the examination of hyperlinks between websites and their significance.
Strengths of documents…
> Access - There is a wealth of different types of secondary qualitative information available – it is the richest vein of information available to researchers in many topic areas. Sometimes documents might be the only means of researching the past.
> Interpretivists generally favour using life documents in social research as they are not produced by the researcher, but written by respondents for their own purposes. This means they should give us an insight into the author’s own world view and meaning. This, of course, depends on us being able to verify the credibility and authenticity of documents.
> In-depth meaning one can gain verstehen.
> Ethically there are few issues with accessing public documents.
Limitations of documents…
> Scott (1990) identifies four potential theoretical limitations which might undermine the usefulness of historical documents.
> The document may lack authenticity – Parts of the document might be missing because of age, and we might not even be able to verify who actually wrote the document.
> The document may lack credibility – We may not be able to verify why somebody wrote the document, and what their motive was. We need to know if the document has been distorted for political reasons, for example, because this would mean they would put a spin on the content.
> Meaning – It may be hard to interpret the meaning of the documents if they are written in an archaic language. With older documents it is not possible to get the authors to clarify what they meant if they are dead.
> Representativeness – Documents may not be representative of the wider population – especially a problem with older documents. Many documents do not survive because they are not stored, and others deteriorate with age and become unusable. Other documents are deliberately withheld from researchers and the public gaze, and therefore do not become available.
