secondary methods

church records

• baptism, marriage, funeral - church records names, dates, addresses
• allow researchers to see how long people lived in past, how many kids, which relatives lived together
• predate first national census of 1801, some have been damage or lost
• Peter Laslett(1972) -  used church records to determine proportions of families that were extended in earlier centuries.

Wills

• tell us of family size+structure in past. What people valued and how many servants they had
• less likely to be preserved over time than church records
• those remaining may not be representative

creative expression

• novels, short stories, plays, poems, folksong, pictures
• used to learn about past ways of life and attitudes
• Philippe Aries(1962) - used medieval and more recent pictures of how childhood has been constructed through the ages
• important to analyse sufficient amount of examples to gain representative data - likely that some works of art and fiction will exaggerate for dramatic effect

diaries

• provide insights into aspects of daily life - gender roles, norms and values, experiences of and attitudes toward historical events
• may provide rich qualitative data, but only the literate and leisured produced them, and few preserved

letters

• insights in to personal experiences in specific contexts
• much in common with diaries
• may not tell truth, bias hard to detect, reflect lives of small proportion of population
• may provide qualitative data unavailable elsewhere

exam tip

• some documents may fall in to more than one category

• soap operas, films, newspapers, magazines, lyrics, advertisements, internet sources
• reveal events in recent past
• attitudes to particular issues
• representation and stereotyping of different groups
• amount of coverage given to certain types of crime
• moral panics - trends that arouse public concern
• news values - the criteria the media use to select which events to cover
• political biases and agendas set by particular media
• amount of violence or sexual content to which viewers are subjected
• Glennys Lobarn(1974) - counted roles of males and females in childrens' books - to show how readers were being socialised into traditional gender roles using 'hard', formal or quantitative content analysis
• more interpretive approach, 'soft' thematic or qualitative content analysis, searching texts for synonyms and connected words to gain overall impression of attitudes
• Stanley Cohen used this method to gauge the degree to which media exaggerated disturbances between mods and rockers in 'folk devils and moral panics'(1972)

• semiology or semantics is an even more interpretive approach, discussion of connotations of words, images and styles.
• quantitative content analysis is relatively reliable but data may be superficial

• statistics collected and published by governments and similar bodies
• census data, school league tables, gov. department data, pressure groups, legal and religious organisations
• provide data about employment, demography, exam results, marriage + divorce, poverty, suicide, church attendance
• Durkheim used suicide rates in germany to support theory that socially intergrated people less likely to committ suicide

exam tip

• contrast Durkheim's faith in statistics with the critical attitudes of phenomenologists such as Atkinson and Douglas - gains application marks.

evaluation

• often from a whole nation - more representative than single research
• comparisons made between different groups, periods of history, or places
• can be generally accessed
• compiled by experts, unlikely to be careless errors

• comparison difficult - different ways of categorising phenomena over time
• government/institution compiling stats may wish to present a certain picture. Biased methods of collection. Marx+Fem distrust data as they are social constructs collected at bidding power of rich.
• not easy to discover circumstances in which early stats were obtained,  categories used/how accurate they are
• may not be available for certain topics
• stats relating to particular tops are flawed 
• crime figures rely on public being aware of crime & reporting it
• suicide figures rely on coroners' judgements
• stats of earning flawed by reluctance to pay income tax

• using just one method provides inadequate data upon which to base conclusions
• 2+ methods from primary and secondary sources, generating both qualitative and quantitative data is better - known as triangulation