Documents

Question 1

What are documents?

Answer 1

• They can refer to written texts, like diaries, government reports, medical records, school reports etc.
• They may be other texts like paintings, photographs, music etc.

Question 2

Describe public documents

Answer 2

• They’re produced by organisations like government departments, schools, welfare agencies and charities. Information produced may be available for researcher
• This includes, Ofsted report, media output etc.

Question 3

Describe personal documents

Answer 3

• They’re first-person accounts of social events and personal experiences, and they often include the writer’s feelings and attitudes
• Includes letters, diaries and photo albums

Question 4

Give an example of a study using personal and public documents

Answer 4

• Thomas and Znaniecki’s ‘The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, a study of migration and social change. As interactions. they wanted to study people’s experiences of these events
• They used personal documents to reveal meanings that individuals have to experiences of migration, included letters bought after an advert in a Polish newspaper in Chicago and autobiographies
• They also used public documents, newspapers and court and social work records to explore the experiences of social change of thousand of people who migrated from rural Poland to the USA

Question 5

Describe historical documents

Answer 5

A personal or public document created in the past

Question 6

Give an example of a study using historical documents

Answer 6

Aries used painting’s of children in his study of the rise of the modern notion of childhood

Question 7

What are practical advantages of documents?

Answer 7

• They may be the only available source of info, e.g. for studying the past
• They’re a free/cheap source of large amounts of data, as someone else has gathered the data

Question 8

What are practical disadvantages of documents?

Answer 8

• It’s not always possible to gain access to them
• individuals and organisations create documents for their own purposes, not sociologists. So they may not contain answers to the kinds of questions the sociologists wishes to ask

Question 9

Why do interpretivists prefer documents?

Answer 9

• They can give the research a valid picture of actors’ meanings. e.g. the rich qualitative data of diaries and letters give us insight into meanings by enabling us to get close to their reality
• As documents aren’t written with the sociologists in mind, they’re more likely to be an authentic statement of their views, unlike other methods were the respondent knows that their answers are used to be used to research purposes

Question 10

Why might documents lack validity?

Answer 10

John Scott identifies a few reasons on how documents should be evaluated
- Authenticity: The researcher doesn’t know that the document is what it claims to be, they can’t be certain it was really written by its supposed author or if it’s forgery. e.g. the ‘Hitler Diaries’ were proven to be fakes
- Credibility: The document may not be believable. e.g. Politicians may write diaries intended for publication that inflate their own importance.
- Meaning: There’s a danger of misinterpreting what the document meant to writer, imposing your own meanings on the data. The researcher may also need special skills to understand if it’s in a foreign

Question 11

Why might documents lack representativeness?

Answer 11

• As Scott notes, some groups may not be represented in documents e.g. the illiterate and those with limited free time to keep diaries
• Evidence in documents may not be typical of other evidence that we don’t have access to. e.g. not all documents survive over time and not all documents are available as the 30-year rule prevents access to may official documents of 30 years

Question 12

Why might documents lack reliability?

Answer 12

• Positivists see documents as unreliable as they’re not standardised to a fixed criteria
• e.g. every diary is unique, compiled in its own way according to the writer’s own meanings. Their uniqueness undermines their representative and makes it difficult to draw generalisations

Question 13

What is content analysis?

Answer 13

A method of dealing systematically with the contexts of documents, especially those produced by mass media.

Question 14

What is formal content analysis?

Answer 14

Formal content analysis allows us to produce quantitative data from documents.

Question 15

How does Ros Gill describe formal content analysis?

Answer 15

• Imagine wanting to measure particular aspects of a media message, e.g. how many female characters are portrayed as being in paid employment in women’s magazine stories.
• We select a representative sample of women’s magazine stores, e.g. all the stories in the 5 most popular magazines during the last months
• Then we decide what categories to use, like employee, full-time house housewife
• Next, we study the stories and place the characters in them into the categories, called coding
• We then quantity how women are characterised in the stories by counting up the number in each category

Question 16

Why do positivist like formal content analysis?

Answer 16

• They regard it as produced objective, representative, quantitative data from which generalisations can be made
• It’s a reliable method as it’s easy for others to repeat and check the findings

Question 17

Why do feminists like formal content analysis?

Answer 17

• It’s attractive in analysing media representations of gender.
• e.g. Best analysed gender roles in children’s reading schema. She found that females were portrayed in a limited range of stereotypes roles

Question 18

Why do interpretivists dislike formal content analysis?

Answer 18

• They see it as invalid.
• They argue that simply counting up how many times something appears in a document tells us nothing about its meanings, either to its author or its audience.

Question 19

Describe thematic analysis

Answer 19

• A qualitative analysis of the content of media texts. It usually involved selecting a small number of cases in-depth analysis.
• The aim is to reveal the underlying meanings that have been ‘encoded’ in the documents, as a way of undercovering the author’s ideological bias.
• e.g.. Soothill and Walby made a thematic analysis of the ways newspaper reported rape cases

Question 20

Give disadvantages of thematic analysis

Answer 20

• It doesn’t attempt to obtain a representative sample, so its findings can’t be safely generalised to a wider range of documents
• There’s a tendency to select evidence that supports the sociologist’s hypothesis rather than seeking to falsify it, which Popper argues is unscientific
• There’s no proof that the meanings the sociologists gives to the document is the true one. e.g. postmodernists would argue that there’s fixed or ‘correct’ meaning to a text and that the sociologists’ reading of it’s just 1 among many.