Secondary Sources: Documentary evidence

Question 1

Historical documents
Peter Laslett (1977)

Answer 1

-studied family size in pre industrial England
-Used church records
-1564-1821 10% of families had kin outside the traditional nuclear family
-The case was the same for 1966 proving there was a myth about the extended family structure of the past
!critics claim documentary evidence is missing, incomplete or never survived passage of time
! past record keeping not guaranteed to be efficient

Question 2

Personal documents

Answer 2

-provide account of individuals thoughts, feelings, experiences
-provide subjective qualitative data
Ex- Anne frank- jew who wrote diary and hid, 1942-1945
+allow researchers to understand the emotions people go through, positivists will get a boner
bad eval - personal document not meant for other people, only close mandem - sean a pussy for not doing this

Question 3

John Scotts assessment of historical documents

Answer 3

Credibility- is document believable? Is author sincere?
Representativeness- does it represent everyone or multiple people who have experienced this views
Authenticity- is document what it claims to be? are there missing pages?
Meaning- may need special skills to understand eg. different language to translate
CRAM
! often they are unrepresentative as they are personal accounts
! sociologists can decide what to include from a document and what to leave out which can be misleading

Question 4

Systematically analysing documentary evidence: Content analysis

Answer 4

Content Analysis- method of systematically dealing with documents
Formal content analysis- researcher is looking to achieve objectivity and reliability
Thematic content analysis- looks at the way particular themes are present throughout documentary evidence
EX- Glenys Lobban 1974
-used content analysis to analyse representation of gender roles in children’s reading, used it to come to conclusion books re-affirm stereotypes
+content analysis is effective as its cheap ad easy to conduct
!interpretivists claim there is nothing useful about counting up the number of times something appears and that it tells us nothing

Question 5

The use of internet in sociological research

Answer 5

Annette Markham 2011
-provides guidelines to warn them of dangers for researchers
-need to check evidence is genuine and sincere
-credibility of the author
-internet security is not always guaranteed increasing the risk of people wanting to remain anonymous being exposed
-anonymity can lead to the incorrect person answering the survey