Assessing Documents Flashcards
What does John Scott argue?
There should be 4 criteria for evaluating documents
What are the 4 criteria?
Authenticity, Credibility, Representativeness and Meaning
What is Authenticity?
Is the doc what it claims to be?
Who actually wrote the doc?
Are there any missing pages?
What is Credibility?
Is the document believable?
Was the author sincere?
Some politicians write diaries to inflate their own importance
What is Representativeness?
Is the evidence in the doc typical?
What is Meaning?
The researcher may need special skills to understand a doc
What sometimes happens in a doc?
It may have to be translated from a foreign lang
What is the impact of translating the doc?
Words may change their meaning over time
What also has to be interpreted?
Actual meaning of doc to the writer and intended audience
What are some advantages of Documents?
- Personal documents are high in validity
- Cheap source of data
- Provides an extra check on results obtained by primary methods
What is Content Analysis?
A method for dealing with the contents of documents systematically
What is Content Analysis best known for?
Analysing docs made by the mass media
What are examples of the mass media?
TV news bulletins, advertisements
What data does Content Analysis produce?
Quantitative Data
How does Ros Gill describe the Content Analysis process?
- Decide categories
- Study the source and fit the characters into the categories
- Count up the numbers in each category
What are some advantages of Content Analysis?
- Easy to find sources of material (newspapers, tv broadcasts)
- Objective and quantitative data useful for Positivists
- Cheap
What do Interpretivists argue?
Simply counting up the number of times something appears says nothing about its meaning
