Research Methods Snippets: Documents

Introduction:

• Written-text pieces of information.
• Secondary information, qualitative data. 
• Interpretivists prefer, achieves their main goal of validity.
• Either public, personal, or historical; created in the past.

Practicality:

• Can often be difficult to obtain. Sometimes, a fee must be paid in order to gain access
• Public documents have much easier access.
• Cheaper form of research as information and data is already collected.

Ethics:

• Use of personal documents may breach privacy and confidentiality of owner, names, addresses and personal info must be redacted before publication.

Reliability:

• Unstandardised and so unreliable.
• Personal documents are unique, government reports will be on different topics, written up by different individuals, making it difficult for generalisations to be drawn from them.
• Positivists however, can carroy out content analysis to produce quantitive data.

Validity:

• Often produce an authentic statement of their author's view.

• Personal documents allow researcher to get close to the social actor's reality.
• Issues in proving authenticity and credibility.

Enough?/Representative:

• Evidence collected may not be typical, not safe to generalise from.
  • Not all historical documents may have survived, are surviving ones typical of the ones that got lost?
  • Certain groups may be unrepresented: the illiterate, those with limited leisure time are unlikely to keep a diary etc.