secondary sources of data - documents

Question 1

What are the three types of documents?

Answer 1

• public documents
• personal documents
• historical documents

Question 2

Public documents

Answer 2

• Produced by organisations e.g govt / schools / charities
• Available for researchers online
• Ofstead reports / company accounts
• Official reports of public enquiries e.g Black report 1980 into inequalities in health

Question 3

Personal documents

Answer 3

• Letters / biographies / photo
• First hand experiences
• Include feelings and attitudes
• Thomas and Znaniecki
  Study of migration and social change
  Used personal documents to gather meaning individuals gave to migration included 764 letters

Also used newspapers / court / social work measures - able to explore experiences of social change with ppl wh

Question 4

Historical documents

Answer 4

• Personal or public document created in the past
• Aries used child rearing manuals + paintings to study rise of modern notion of childhood
• Laslett used parish records in his study of family structure in pre - industrial England

Question 5

What 4 criteria did SCOTT put forward assesing documents

Answer 5

1. authenticity
2. credibility
3. representativeness
4. meaning

Question 6

Scott - authenticity

Answer 6

• Is the document what it claims to be
• Who wrote the document
• Is it free from errors
• Subjective to bias / interpretation
• One sided account

Question 7

Scott - credibility

Answer 7

• Is document believable
• Politicians write diaries intended for publication to inflate importance
• Is the document accurate → written soon after the event?

Question 8

Scott - representativeness

Answer 8

• Not all documents survive
• Not all surviving documents available for researchers to use → 30 yr rule prevents access to official documents for 30 years
• If classified as official secrets → not documented at all
• Certain groups underrepresented - illiterate unlikely to keep diaries

Question 9

Scott - meaning

Answer 9

• Researcher needs skills to understand document ( translation)
• Interpret what document means to writer

Question 10

advantages of documents

Answer 10

• Enable researcher to get closer to social actor’s realities giving personal insight through qualitative data ( personal documents)
• Only source of past information ( historical)
• Providing another source of data documents offer an extra check on primary methods
• Cheap source of data - someone already gathered the info

Question 11

What is a content analysis?

Answer 11

A method for dealing systematically with the contents of documents.

Question 12

GILL - how content analysis works?

Answer 12

1. decide what categories we are going to use ie. employee
2. Study the source and place characters in it into the categories we have decided upon
   3.Count up the number in each category

Question 13

advantages of content analysis

Answer 13

Cheap
Usually easy to find sources of material in the from of newspapers, tv broadcasts so on
Positivists see it as useful source of objective , quantitative, scientific data

Question 14

interpretivist views

Answer 14

• Not usually written with research in mind - can be authentic statement of authors views
• Provide qualitative data - insight into authors views and world meanings
• Achieve main goal of validity

Question 15

positivists view

Answer 15

• Unstandardised and unreliable → difficult to draw generalisable - diaries unique
• Unrepresentative - only literate groups can write diaries and letters
• Interpreting documents - researchers ma intend their own meanings on them

Do sometimes carry out content analysis on documents to produce quantitative data from them