Documents

Question 1

What are public and personal documents?

Answer 1

Personal documents are usually private documents created for the person’s own use. Such as letters, diaries, emails or pupils’ school reports and medical files.

Public documents are produced for public consumption. Such as reports produced by government, charities, businesses and the media, as well as novels and autobiographies.

Question 2

How useful are documents?

Answer 2

Scott (1990) has suggested four criteria for establishing the value of public and private documents

Authenticity: Is the document genuine or a forgery?

Credibility: Is the evidence believable, sincere and honest?

Representativeness: Is the document typical of those appearing at the time?

Meaning: Do the documents have the same meaning now as they did at the time they were first produced?

Question 3

What are advantages of documents?

Answer 3

• They are already available and, therefore, cheap to use
• They may be the only data available for certain types of research, such as historical research
• They provide valid in-depth qualitative data, providing insights into the attitudes, values, and meanings of those people who produced them
• No ethical issues involved, as public documents are readily available to anyone who wants to use them

Question 4

What are disadvantages of documents?

Answer 4

• Documents may not be genuine, especially if they are personal, historical documents
• Their meaning might have changed over time
• They may not be representative, so findings cannot be generalised
  Using private documents without permission can cause ethical problems related to consent
• They may not be reliable or valid, bias in newspapers, etc

Question 5

What is content analysis?

Answer 5

Content analysis produces quantitative data about the content of qualitative documents by, for example, establishing categories and then analysing the documents and counting each time the number of category appear.

A researcher might, for example, wish to examine gendered language within daily newspapers to see which ones are more likely to employ gender stereotypes.

Question 6

What are advantages of content analysis?

Answer 6

• A cheap way of carrying out research into readily available documents
• Reliable because it produces quantitative statistical data that can be easily checked
• Enables the discovery of things that might not have been obvious prior to the analysis, such as gender stereotyping in young adult fiction

Question 7

What are disadvantages of content analysis?

Answer 7

• They might be unreliable because it rests on the categories that the researcher has chosen
• Descriptive rather than explanatory