AQA A Level Sociology Documents
- Created by: harriet_docksey
- Created on: 14-01-21 11:45
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- Documents
- Include written texts and music, radio, paintings, drawings...
- Practical Issues
- May be the only available source of info
- Can study the past with them
- Free/cheap as someone else has already gathered the info
- Not always possible to gain access to them (sensitive, incriminating info)
- Individuals/organisations wrote up those documents for their own purposes: may not answer question
- Theoretical Issues
- High validity: this is due to qualitative data
- Thomas and Znaniecki (1919): used documents to show the experience of Polish migrants
- Scott (1990): 3 issues with the validity of documents
- 1. May not be authentic: could be a forgery...
- 2. Credibility: key details may have been forgotten, details may have been softened
- 3. Misinterpretation: May impose our own meaning on the data. Difficulties if it's written in a foreign language, meaning of words have changed...
- Reliability: Positivists regard docs as unreliable because they are unique. Undermines their representativeness and means it's difficult to draw generalisations from them
- Representativeness: some groups may not be represented, such as the illiterate or who were too busy to write
- Not all documents survive
- 30 year rule prevents access to many docs
- Docs containing official secrets will never be revealed, neither will diaries
- High validity: this is due to qualitative data
- Content Analysis
- Formal content analysis
- Gill (1988): select a representative sample of what you want to study, the split it into categories, then code it, then quantify the info
- Positivists like formal content analysis as it produces objective, representative, quantitative data
- Feminists: Best (1993) like formal content analysis
- Interpretivists: requires a judgement to categorise the data, counting data doesn't reveal much
- Gill (1988): select a representative sample of what you want to study, the split it into categories, then code it, then quantify the info
- Thematic Analysis
- Involves selecting a small number of cases for in-depth analysis
- Soothill and Walby (1991): feminists used thematic analysis in their study of ****
- Criticisms: doesn't obtain a representative sample so can't be generalised. Data is only picked if it agrees with the hypothesis.
- Involves selecting a small number of cases for in-depth analysis
- Formal content analysis
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