Documents

Documents

1. -Interpretivists -qualitative -secondary data

2. A 'document' is any text such as personal diaries, government reports, medical records, novels, newspapers etc. Photos, films, TV, internet

3. Either public which you can access anywhere (general population) or private (a person's personal thoughts or feelings) where you need permission to view

4. Interpretivists favour as documents are a high source of validity but positivists disagree as they're not scientific

5. Practical

   • Public documents are generally quick, cheap and easy to access
   • Private documents are difficult to access as they're personal therefore access granted by a gatekeeper is needed

6. Validity

   • high in truthfulness; as researcher can put themselves in anothers shoes that provides an insight (ASAPOASS) allows vereshten
   • Some documents could be fake or untrue and sociologists cannot tell if they are
   • sometimes documents are the only source of info available e.g. Philip Aries - childhood

7. Reliability

   • Each document is unique which makes them unreliable and unrepresentative making it impossible for sociologists to make generalisations

8. Ethics

   • very few especially with public documents

9. Ethnocentric

   • Researchers may impose their values (interpret from a biased point of view)

10. Content analysis; sociologists systematically study documents e.g. if they were to study femininity in magazines, key word categories such as sex and they will analyse based upon how many times it appears