Documents
- Created by: amyjohnson1
- Created on: 04-02-22 10:04
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- Documents
- Types of Documents
- Written texts: diaries, letters, emails, text, newspapers etc
- Other texts: paintings, drawings, photos, maps, sounds, music etc
- Public documents: produced by organisations such as schools and businesses which can include ofsted reports etc
- Personal documents: facebook pages, letters, photo albums etc
- Historical documents: personal or public documents created in the past
- Practical Issues
- May be the only source of information for studying the past
- They are free or cheap source of large amounts of data
- Saves time
- Not always possible to gain access
- Individuals and organisations create documents for their own purpose, not for sociologists
- Theoretical Issues
- Validity
- Documents aren't written with the sociologist in mind, so are more likely to bea better view
- Can only be valid if it is genuinely what it claims to be
- Issue of credibility, key details might have been forgotten
- Misinterpretation affects the validity of the documents
- Reliability
- Documents are not standardised
- Representativeness
- Uniqueness undermines the representativeness
- The illiterate and those with little leisure time are less likely to keep diaries
- Not all documents survive
- Not all documents are available
- Validity
- Content Analysis
- Formal content analysis
- Source of quantitative data from documents
- Ros Gill (1988) 1: select a representative sample 2: decide what categories to use 3: study the documents and place into categories (coding) 4: quantify each category
- Favoured by positivists as it produces objective quantitative data
- Interpretivists reject formal as it lacks validity
- Thematic analysis
- Qualitative data from documents
- Select small number of cases for in-depth analysis
- Criticised for lack of representativeness, evidence selected tends to support sociologist's hypothesis, no proof that what the sociologist thinks is true
- Formal content analysis
- Types of Documents
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