Personal Documents

Personal Documents

1. What?

   • For a persons own use which record part of a persons life
   • Private diaries, personal letters, personal photographs, school reports, medical files and private bank statements

2. Interpretivists

   • Favoured because they give an insight into social actors' reality with rich detailed qualitative data
   • Atkinson suicide study. Used personal documents to gain insight into why people commited suicide. Thought that the suicide rate was interpreted wrongly by doctors and coroners

3. Positivists

   • Dislike personal documents because they are not scientific, objective or systematic enough.

4. Advantages

   • Highly valid as they are usually written for personal use (e.g. diaries) so people are likely to be very truthful in what they write. Produces qualitative primary data.
   • Sometimes the only source of information, especially when studying the past. E.g. Aries and paintings
   • Can be used as an additional source of data alongside primary data. Can be used as a check against things uncovered by primary methods e.g. interviews.
   • Cheap source of data as someone else has already gathered the information. Convenient and potentially accessible. Saves sociological researchers time

5. Disadvantages

   • Need to be assessed for authenticity, representativeness, credibility, meaning - can be difficult to assess and is time consuming. Problems with any of these reduces the validity
   • Some groups of people (e.g. illiterate) are unlikely to produce personal documents such as diaries or letters, therefore their views are not represented. This is not accessing all people
   • Those with time and skills to produce diaries or letters etc. may be over represented making the findings limited to a certain type of person
   • Some documents are written based on memory which may not be accurate - memory distortion
   • Personal bias is present - subjective
   • Difficult to analyse