1.3.10

Documents

Test yourself

Documents

Documents tend to provide qualitative data, so they are preferred by interpretivists. Common types of documents include personal and public documents.

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Personal and public

  • Personal documents are usually private documents created for the person’s own use.
    • Such as letters, diaries, emails or pupils’ school reports and medical files.
  • Public documents are produced for public consumption.
    • Such as reports produced by government, charities, businesses and the media, as well as novels and autobiographies.
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Judging the usefulness of documents

  • Scott (1990) has suggested four criteria for establishing the value of public and private documents.
    • Authenticity: Is the document genuine or a forgery?
    • Credibility: Is the evidence believable, sincere and honest?
    • Representativeness: Is the document typical of those appearing at the time?
    • Meaning: Do the documents have the same meaning now as they did at the time they were first produced?

Documents: Evaluation

Documents tend to provide qualitative data, so they are preferred by interpretivists. Common types of documents include personal and public documents.

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Advantages

  • They are already available and, therefore, cheap to use.
  • They may be the only data available for certain types of research, such as historical research.
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Advantages cont.

  • They provide valid in-depth qualitative data, providing insights into the attitudes, values, and meanings of those people who produced them.
  • No ethical issues involved, as public documents are readily available to anyone who wants to use them.
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Disadvantages

  • Documents may not be genuine, especially if they are personal, historical documents.
  • Their meaning might have changed over time.
  • They may not be representative, so findings cannot be generalised.
  • Using private documents without permission can cause ethical problems related to consent.
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Disadvantages cont.

  • They may not be reliable or valid. For example:
    • Government reports might use data in biased ways.
    • Newspapers might be biased towards a particular ideology or cause so they might misrepresent the information.

Content Analysis

Content analysis produces quantitative data about the content of qualitative documents.

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Content analysis

  • Content analysis produces quantitative data about the content of qualitative documents by, for example, establishing categories and then analysing the documents and counting each time the number of category appear.
  • A researcher might, for example, wish to examine gendered language within daily newspapers to see which ones are more likely to employ gender stereotypes.
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Advantages

  • 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.
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Disadvantages

  • They might be unreliable because it rests on the categories that the researcher has chosen.
  • Descriptive rather than explanatory.

Jump to other topics

1Theory & Methods

2Education with Methods in Context

3Option 1: Culture & Identity

4Option 1: Families & Households

5Option 1: Health

6Option 1: Work, Poverty & Welfare

7Option 2: Beliefs in Society

8Option 2: Global Development

9Option 2: The Media

10Crime & Deviance

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