Documents

Documents

1. Types of Documents

   • Personal documents are usually private documents created for the person's own use e.g. letters, diaries, emails, pupil's school reports and medical files
   • Public documents are produced for public consumption e.g. reports by the government, charities, businesses and the media, novels and autobiographies
   • Tend to provide qualitative data, and are therefore preferred by interpritivists

2. Judging the Usefulness of Documents

   • Scott (1990) suggested four criteria for establishing the usefulness of documents:
     • Authenticity: is the document genuine or a forgery?
     • Credibility: is the document believable, sincere and honest?
     • Representativeness: is the document typical of those appearing at the same time?
     • Meaning: do the documents have the same meaning now as they did when they were produced?

3. Strengths

   • They are already available, and therfeore cheap to use
   • They may be the only data available for certain types of research, such as historical research
   • They provide valid, in-depth qualitative data, providing insights into the attitudes, values, and meanings of the people who produced them
   • No ethical issues involved, as public documents are readily available to anyone who wants to use them

4. Weaknesses

   • Documents may not be genuine, especially if they are personal, historical documents
   • Their meaning may have changed over time
   • They may not be representative, so findings cannot be generalised
   • Using private documents without permission can cause ethical issues related to consent
   • Governments may use data in biased ways
   • Newspapers might be biased towards a particular ideology or cause so they might misrepresent data

5. Content Analysis

   • What is it?
     • Content analysis produces quantitative data about the content of qualitative documents, for example by establishing categories and then analysing the documents and counting how many times each category appears
     • For example, a researcher might wish to examine gendered language in daily newspapers to see which ones are more likely to employ gender stereotypes
   • Strengths
     • A cheap way of carrying out research into readily available documents
     • Reliable because it produces quantitative statistical data that can be easily checked
     • Enables the discovery of things that might not have been obvious prior to the analysis, such as gender stereotyping in young adult fiction
   • Weaknesses
     • They might be unreliable because it rests on the categories that the researcher has chosen
     • Descriptive rather than explanatory