Sociology: Documents

Documents = secondary data that is created by individuals, groups or organisations.

Personal documents -> letters, diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, notes and photo collections.

Public documents _> reports from govs, charities or businesses.

Documents are mainly forms of qualitative data. 

Some documents contain statistical data.

Some documents are contemporary whereas others are historical.

Inter. prefer to use them as they produce valid and qualitative data that reveals the definitions the social actors attached to situations. 

Pos. reject them because they lack reliability and are unrepresentative. However, they still use statistical data that is contained in the documents or may choose to convert some of the qualitative data into quantitative data by using content analysis.

Advantages:

They're mostly written for personal reasons and are therefore high in validity as they reveal an authentic insight into the author's thoughts and feelings.

Most personal documents are cheap and save the researcher's time.

Disadvantages:

Some groups (the illiterate) are unlikely to produce personal documents. 

This means that those with literacy skills (often the wealthier in societies) are over-represented.

Some documents are created after an event and therefore have hindsight (e.g memoirs or autobiographies) and therefore do not show the actor's definitions during the event.

Some personal documents (such as letters) are written for an audience, this can impact what is recorded. This decreases validity. 

They are produced by bodies such as govs, businesses, the media and organisations.

They are often plentiful, detail, cheap and easy to access.

However, the authors wrote them with the public in mind and therefore the content is likely biased to portray them in a good light. This decreases their validity. 

Historial documents = only way to study past events (especially if there are no survivors to question).

Interpreting historical documents can be difficult e.g the meaning of words change over time.

Historical documents can be lost, destroyed or incompleted.

Quantitative content of documents measures how much coverage is given to an issues e.g news reports can be quantified in regards to how much time is given to a particular point of view.

Knowing how much coverage something receives does not tell us about its meaning.

Therefore inter. use qualitative content analysis to study the meaning attached to words, images, etc.

However, this causes problems as different sociologists may interpret the same thing differently. 

Scott (1990) suggests four ways to test a document:

Authenticity -> Is it genuine? Is it what it claims to be?

Credibility -> Can we believe the document and the sincerity of the author?

Representativeness -> How typical is the document of a wider social group?

Meaning -> Can we interpret the author's meanings correctly?

Documents can provide useful insight into people's behaviour.

They can provide a historical/ 'insider' perspective.

They are limited in terms of availability, representativeness, lack of systematisation and they may not cover all areas that are of sociological interest.

They are rarely the main element in a study (apart from historical studies).

Practical issues -> schools are run by the state and they compete against one another for customers, so, a large amount of information is publicly available. This includes school policy statements, local authority guidelines, school brochures, etc. 

Ethical issues ->  there are few ethical concerns as these documents have been placed in the public domain. Issues arising with using personal documents such as school reports, student's workbooks, etc.

Reliability -> many documents (e.g registers) are in a systematic format, allowing for direct comparisons to be made. However, errors made the filling these documents reduce their reliability.

Credibility -> public documents give the 'official' picture of what is happening in schools. In an education market, schools compete for customers and so they want to be seen in a positive light. This means that most documents are written with the fact that consumers will see them in mind. This makes them less credible and less valid. 

Representativeness -> As some documents are legally required for all schools, they are likely to be representative. However, not everything is recorded (e.g racist incidents) which reduces representativeness. Personal documents that are produced by teacher/ students are unrepresentative as they are collected in an unsystematic manner.

Validity -> Documetns can provide insights into meaning held by teachers and students and are therefore high invalidity. However, all documents are to different interpretations, Age and other differences between sociologists and pupils means they cannot be sure what the student meant in their personal documents.