documents

documents

1. what are they?

   • they can be any written text e.g. personal diaries, gov reports, medical records, newspapers, letters, emails, blogs, webpages ect. 'text' can also mean paintings, drawings, photographs and maps. we can also include sound and images from film, TV, radio and other media outputs.

2. public documents

   • they are produced by an organisation. some of this output may be available for researchers to use e.g. ofsted reports, minutes of council meetings.
   • they also include official reports of public enquiries
     • e.g. the black report into inequalities on health, which became a major source of info for sociologists.

3. personal documents

   • these include items such as letters and diaries. they are first person accounts of social events and personal experience, and generally include the writers feelings and atitudes
   • an example would be William Thomas and Florian Zanecki's the polish peasant in europe and america, a study of migration and social change. as interactionists they were particularly interested in peoples personal experiences of these events.
   • thomas and zanecki also udes public documents, such as newspaper articles and court and social work records. they were able t explore the experiences of social change of some of the thousand people who migrated to the USA in the early 20th century
   • they used personal documents to reveal the meanings individuals gave to their experiences of migration. the documents included 764 letters bought after an advertisement in a polish newspapers in chicago and several autobiographies

4. historical documents

   • a historical document is a public or personal documents made in the past. if we want to study the past historical documents are usually the only source of information
     • however, if it is the recent past there may still be people alive who can be questioned
   • the study of families and households highlights some of the types of historical documents that have been used:
     • laslett
       • used parish records to study the pre-inductrial family
     • Anderson
       • used parliamentary reports on child labour to study the changes in family structure in the 19th century
     • Aries
       • used child rearing manuals and paintings of chiildren in his study of the rise of the modern notion of childhood

5. assessing documents

   • scott
     • argues that when it comes to assessing documents, the general principle is evaluating its authenticity, credability, representativeness and meaning
   • authenticity
     • is the documents what it claims to be?
     • are there any missing pages, is it free from errors
     • who wrote it?
     • e.g. the hitler diaries were proven to be fake
   • credability
     • is the document believable
     • was the aurthor sincere
     • politicians may write diaries intended for publication that inflate their own importance
     • thomas and znaniecki
       • polish immigrants may have lied in their letters home about how good lige in the USA was, to justify their decision to emigrate
     • is the document accurate- was the account written soon after the event or years later.
       • stein
         • notes that documents on the internet are often not checked for accuracy before publication
   • representativeness
     • is the evidence in the document typical?
     • if we cannot answer the question, we cannot know if it is safe to generalise from the document
     • most documents don't survive
       • are the surviving documents typical of those destroyed or lost
     • not all surviving documents are available
       • the 30 year rule prevents access to some documents for 30 years and, if classified official secrets, they may not be available at all. private documents such as diaries may never become available, or only after the death of the author
     • certain groups may be under represented
       • e.g. the illitrate, those who have limited leisure time are unlikely to keep diaries. the better educated the classes are the more likely they are to be over represented
   • positivists and interpretivists
     • positivists
       • reject documents because they are unreliable, unrepresentative and can't make generalisations from them
       • they are often unstandaridised and unreliable e.g every persons diary is uniques, therefore it is hard to make generalisations
       • they are unrepresentative e.g. only literate groups can write diaries and letters
       • in interpreting documents, researchers may impose their own meanings on them
       • however, they do sometimes carry out content analysis on documents to produce quantitative data
     • interpretivist
       • favour documents because they achieve validity
       • they are not usually written with research in mind and can thus be an authentic statement of the authors views
       • they provide qualitative data that gives us insight into the authors world view and meanings
   • meanings
     • the researcher may need soecial skills to understand a document e.g. it may have to be translated from a foreign language and words may change their meaning over time
     • we also have to interpret what the document means to the writer and intended audience. different sociologists may inrepret the same document differently
     • thomas and znanieki that the interpretations they offered in their book were not always based on the data from the document
   • advantages
     • they anable the researched to get close to the social actors reality, giving insight through qualitative data
     • some documents are the only souce of information, docments offer an extra check on the results obtained by primary methods
     • they are often a cheap source of data because thye are secondary. this also saves time

6. content analysis

   • this is a method of systematicaly dealing with the contents of the document
   • it is known best for its use in analysing documentts produced by the mass media, such as TV news bulletins and advertisements
   • although such documents are usually qualitative,content analysis allows quantitative data to be poduced from these sources
   • gill
     • describes how content analysis works . e.g, how many female characters are portrayed as being in paid employment:
       • first we decide whta categories we are going to use e.g. employee, full time house wife ect.
       • then we study the source and place the characters into the categories
       • then we count up the number in each category
   • we might then go on to compare the results of our content analysis with the official statistics of female employment to see if the media were presenting a false picture of women's roles
   • lobban
     • used content analysis to analyse gender roles in children's reading schemes, whilet uchman used it to analyse how TV portrayed women. lobban and tuchman both found that females were portrayed in a range of roles that were limited and stereotyped e.g. lobban found that female characters were playing domestic roles
   • advantages
     • cheap
     • is is usually easy to find sources of material
     • positivists see is as a useful source of objective quantitative scientific data
   • however, interpretivists argue that souting up numbers of times something appears in a document doesn't tell us about the meaning
   • a god example to test would be crime due to overexaggeration of working class crime in the media