Qualitative: Documents (Secondary) Flashcards
What are written texts?
Written texts - dairies, letter, emails, SMS texts, internet pages, novels, newspapers, school reports, government reports, medical records, parish registers, train timetables, shopping lists, financial records, graffiti, etc.
What are other texts?
Other texts - paintings, drawings, photographs, maps and recorded or broadcast sounds and images from film, music, TV, radio, home video, etc.
What are public documents?
Public documents - produced by organisations such as government departments, schools, welfare agencies, businesses and charities. Public documents include Ofsted reports, council meeting minutes, media output, records of parliamentary debates and the reports of public inquiries.
What are personal documents?
Personal documents - facebook pages, letters, diaries, photo albums and autobiographies. First person accounts of social events and personal experiences and often include the writer’s feelings and attitudes.
What are historical documents?
Historical documents - personal or public documents created in the past.
What are practical issues of documents?
✔️ May be the only available source of information, for example in studying the past.
✔️ They are a free or cheap source of large amounts of data, because someone else has already gathered the information.
✔️ Save the sociologist time.
❌ Not always possible to gain access to them.
❌ individuals and organisations create documents for their own purposes, not the sociologist’s. Therefore they may not contain answers to the kinds of questions the sociologist wishes to ask.
What are ethical issues of documents?
- Present fewer ethical problems than primary sources
- Use of an organisation’s unpublished documents may raise ethical issues e.g. if a researcher made public a school’s confidential reports on bullying, this could harm its reputation and chances of recruiting pupils, therefore informed consent and concealing the organisation’s identity may be essential in these cases
- If public documents have been ‘leaked’ to the researcher, informed consent hasn’t been gained. However, it could be justified if the use of such data could serve the public interest.
Theoretical issues.
Are documents high or low in validity to interpretivists?
(Thomas and Znaniecki’s study - 1919)
- Preferred by interpretivists - can give the researcher a valid picture of actors’ meanings.
- Thomas and Znaniecki’s (1919) study - The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Interactionist study of migration and social change - used documents. 764 letters, autobiographies and public documents such as newspaper articles and court and social work records. Used to reveal the meanings individuals gave to their experience of migration.
- It is also more likely to be an authentic statement of the author’s views as they are not written with the sociologist in mind.
However, documents may lack validity. What 3 reasons does John Scott (1990) identify for this?
- A document can only yield valid data if it is authentic.
- Issue of credibility - is it believable?
- Danger of misinterpreting what the document meant to the author and the audience.
Are documents high or low in reliability?
- Positivists see documents as unreliable sources of data.
- Documents are not standardised like official stats.
- Uniqueness also undermines representativeness and therefore makes it difficult to draw generalisations.
Are documents high or low in representativeness?
Some groups may not be represented in documents for example the illiterate and those with limited leisure time are unlikely to keep diaries.
The evidence in the documents that we have access to may not be typical of the evidence in other documents that we don’t have access to:
- Not all documents survive - are the surviving ones typical of the ones lost or destroyed?
- Not all documents are available - 30 year rule, official secrets.
What is the content analysis for documents?
This is a method for dealing with the contents of documents, especially by the mass media. Two main types of content analysis, formal and thematic.
What is the formal content analysis for documents?
Documents are normally qualitative forms of data, formal content analysis enables us to quantify data. Gil (1988) describes how formal content analysis might work:
- For example: How many female characters are portrayed as being in paid employment in women’s magazine stories?
1. Select a representative sample of women’s magazine stories.
2. Decide what categories are to be used.
3. Study the stories and place the characters in them into the chosen categories (coding).
4. Quantify how women are characterised in the stories by counting how many in each category.
What are additional theoretical issues?
- Attractive to positivists - produces objective, representative, quantitative data from which generalisations can be made.
- Reliable.
- Can also then find trends over time.
- Interpretivists criticise it for lack of validity.
- Not as objective as positivists claim - creating categories and deciding which one to put the data into is subjective involving judgements by the sociologist.
What is the thematic analysis for documents?
- Qualitative analysis of media content - used by interpretivists and feminists.
- Select a small number of cases for in depth analysis. Aim is to reveal the underlying meanings that have been encoded in the documents, uncovering the authors ideological bias.
