Advantages and Disadvantages of Documents

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Advantages and Disadvantages of Documents

Advantages

  • Access to difficult subjects
  • No Hawthorne effect
  • Low cost and detailed
  • Researcher may impose their own meanings when interpretating data

Disadvantages

  • May be seen as subjective
  • Can be time consuming
  • Ethical - may not have been made for research purpose so need informed consent

Evaluation

Interpretivists favour documents as they achieve the main goal of validity - authentic statement of authors views and provide detailed data. Positivists reject this for not achieving kmain goals of reliability, representativeness or generalisability 

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