Documents

Documents

1. The term ‘document’ refers to any written text, such as personal diaries, government reports, medical records, novels, newspapers, letters, emails, blogs, web pages, and so on. Even photographs, paintings, and maps can be considered to be ‘texts’ for this purpose, as can sounds and images from television and radio. There are two types of documents: public and personal.

   • Public documents are produced by organisations such as Government departments, schools, welfare agencies, etc. Some of the data may be available for researchers to use. Examples of public documents that are available to researchers are council minutes, Ofsted reports, and records of parliamentary debates.
     • Personal documents include items such as letters, diaries, photo albums and autobiographies. They are first-person accounts of social events and personal experiences, typically including the writer’s feelings and attitudes. A famous example is Thomas and Znaniecki’s study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, which looked at migration and social change. As interactionists, they were particularly interested in people’s personal experiences of these events, and used personal documents to reveal the meanings that individuals gave to their experience of migration. The documents they used included 764 letters and several autobiographies. Thomas and Znaniecki also used public documents, e.g. newspaper articles and court records, and in using these they were able to explore the experiences of social change of some of the thousands of people who migrated from rural Poland to America in the early 20th century.
       • Both public and personal documents can also be historical documents – that is, created in the past. Historical documents are typically the only source of information regarding the past. The study of families and households illustrates some of the types of historical documents that have been used: Laslett used parish records in his study of family structure in pre-industrial England, Anderson used parliamentary reports on child labour and statistical material from the 1851 census to study changes in family structure in the 19th century, and Aries used child-rearing manuals and painting of children in his study of the rise of the modern notion of childhood.

2. Scott argues that when it comes to assessing documentary sources, the general principles are the same as those for any other type of sociological evidence. He states four measures for evaluating documents: 1. Authenticity – Is the document what is claims to be? Are there any missing pages? If it is a copy, is it free from errors? Who actually wrote the document? 2. Credibility – Is the document believable? Was the author sincere? Is the document accurate? How long after the event was the document written? 3. Representativeness – Is the evidence in the document typical? Is it safe to generalise? 4. Meaning – Does the researcher require special skills to understand the document? Does the document have to be translated? Do the words used have the same meaning as they did when the document was written? What does the document actually mean to the writer and the intended audience?

   • Although documents require careful assessment before they can be used, they do have several important advantages. Personal documents, e.g. diaries and letters, enable the researcher to get close to the social actor’s reality, giving insight through their detailed qualitative data. This is why interpretivists favour them. Sometimes documents are the only source of information, for example, in studying the past. By providing extra sources of data, documents can be viewed as an ‘extra check’ on the results obtained through primary methods. Finally, They’re cheap and save time, as someone else has already gathered the information.

3. Content analysis is a method for systematically dealing with the contents of documents. It most commonly used in analysing documents produced by the mass media, such as television news bulletins and advertisements. Although such documents are usually qualitative, content analysis enables sociologists to also produce quantitative data from the sources. Gill describes how content analysis works as follows:

   • Imagine we want to measure particular aspects of a media message; for example, how many female characters are portrayed as being in paid employment. First, we decide what categories we’re going to use. Next, we study the source and place the character in it into the categories we have decided upon. We can then count up the number in each category. We night then go on to compare the results of our content analysis with the official statistics for female employment to see if the media were presenting a false or stereotypical picture of women’s roles. Lobban used content analysis to analyse gender roles in children’s reading schemes, and Tuchman used it to analyse television’s portrayal of women. Lobban and Tuchman both found that females were portrayed in a range of roles that were both limited and stereotyped. For example, Lobban found that female characters were typically portrayed playing domestic roles.
     • Content analysis has several advantages: its cheap, it’s quite easy to find sources to use, and it is arguably a useful source of objective, quantitative, scientific data. However, interpretivist sociologists argue that simply counting up the number of times something appears in a document tell us nothing about its true meaning.