Documents
Sociology: AQA A Level, topic 1.3.10
Documents
Documents tend to provide qualitative data, so they are preferred by interpretivists. Common types of documents include personal and public documents.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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- Documents may not be genuine, especially if they are personal, historical documents.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.
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.
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.
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.
Disadvantages
- They might be unreliable because it rests on the categories that the researcher has chosen.
- Descriptive rather than explanatory.
Test yourself on Documents
Which is an example of a public document?
Who suggested four criteria for establishing the value of public and private documents?