DOCUMENTS

DOCUMENTS

1. STRENGTHS

2. WEAKNESSESS

3. From a practical point documents are CHEAP because someone else has already gathered the data. Public documents are easy to ACCESS.

4. Personal documents allow for VERSTEHEN i.e. seeing how someone views the world through their lives.

5. Personal documents tend to be high in VALIDITY if they are authentic and are not written with an audience in mind. They reveal a persons inner thoughts and feelings. Public and historical are less so.

6. HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS allow for COMPARISONS to be made with contempary society.

7. Some documents are difficult to obtain, for example personal documents may never become available and public documents can only be accessed after 30 years.

8. There are ETHICAL ISSUES with personal documents because there is no permission to use them. This creates a confidentiality issue.

9. The findings from personal documents are very hard to generalise because they are so unique to the individual/group.

10. The surviving documents may be unrepresentative as they may not be typical of lost documents. This lowers the VALIDITY.

11. They are difficult to check against anything which makes them low in RELIABILITY. However they may be a researchers only source.

12. Personal documents are a good source of qualitative data because they tell us about the emotions of the person or group.

13. INTRO: different types of documents: personal, public and historical. (examples of each) Favoured by interpretists. Secondary method.

14. CONCLUSION