Documents

Question 1

What is an document?

Answer 1

Relate to any written text personal diaries come reports novels newspapers letters emails webpages parish records. They include paintings photographs drawings sounds

Question 2

What are public, personal, historical documents?

Answer 2

Public: produced by organisations stuck as government departments, schools, businesses. Some of their output may be available for sociological use.
Personal: first person account of social events and personal experience including writers feedings and attitudes.
Historical: can be personal or public to study past documents are usually the only source.

Question 3

How to assess documents?

Answer 3

Scott found that the general principles are same for any other type of evidence, the 4 criteria’s are:
- authenticity: claims to be, missing pages, who
- credibility: believable, sincere, accurate
- representative: typical, safe to generalise, certain groups who do not keep personal documents are underrepresented
- meaning: special stills to interpreate and understand meanings of a document (meant by writer and the intended audience).

Question 4

Advantages and disadvantages of document

Answer 4

+ allows sociologist to get close to social actors reality to provide detailed qualitative data.
+ sometimes only source from past offer an extra check on results obtained, cheap and time efficient data.
-interpretive simply counting num if something that appears does not explain in-depth meaning.
- diff meanings and interpretation
- some online documents have not been verified.
- cannot access some documents

Question 5

How can documents be used in education?

Answer 5

• Practical: schools compete with each other for customers so large amount of info is publicly available. I school policy statements, local authority guidelines, school brochures, websites).
• ethical: public documents less concern, however personal documents reed consent.
• reliability: many documents in a systematic format so can make comparisons. However accidental mistakes can reduce reliability.
• credibility: give the official picture many documents are constructed with a parental audience in mind. So less believable + valid.
• representativeness: some documents are legally required so likely representative. However not all behaviour is recorded to reduce representativeness and personal documents as collected in an unsystematic way.
• validity: can provide important insights into meanings held by teachers/
  Pupil. However all document are open tO diff interpretations.