Documents

Question 1

What is a document ?

Answer 1

Secondary data source created by individual , groups and organisations
They are either personal or public
They usually contain qualitative data that express beliefs or meanings
They can be statistical
They can be contemporary or historical
Favoured by interpretivists

Question 2

What is a personal document ?

Answer 2

Personal documents : These can be letters , diaries , memoirs , autobiographies , notes and photographs

Question 3

What is a public document ?

Answer 3

Public documents : here can be reports from governments , charities , schools, and businesses

Question 4

What are the strengths of personal documents ?

Answer 4

As they are usually written for personal purposes , usually very high in validity (t)
They are usually cheap and quick (p)

Question 5

What are the limitations of using personal documents ?

Answer 5

Not all groups produce personal documents (e.g. vulnerable members of society) (t)
Hindsight may change data (t)
If an audience is in mind , this may change data (t)

Question 6

What are the strengths of using public documents ?

Answer 6

They are usually cheap and quick to access , the government reports on all areas of policy (p)
They are usually rich in detail (t)

Question 7

what are the imitations of using public documents ?

Answer 7

The author is aware the documents will be public , so there may be bias in selection and presentation of data (t)

Question 8

What are the strengths of historical documents ?

Answer 8

They are the only accounts of data from the past in some cases (p)
They may show trends overtime
Allows us access top data that we may have nothing else to account it for

Question 9

What are the limitations of using historical documents ?

Answer 9

Some historical documents can be subjective
Things like documents get lost over time
They are hard to analyse
Damaged documents
Only rich people could back during some eras so not representative

Question 10

How do you know if a document is useful ?

Answer 10

Authenticity :
Is it genuine ? Is the document what it claims to be ? Is it free from errors like missing pages ? Who wrote it ?
Credibility :
Is the document believable ? Was the author sincere ? Is the document accurate ?
Representativeness :
Is the evidence in the document typical ? If we cannot answer this questions , we cannot know whether it is safe to generalise from it: not all documents survive , not all surviving documents are available for researchers to use and certain groups maybe underrepresented.
Meaning :
Can you interpret meanings correctly ? The researcher may need special skills to understand the document. Different sociologists any interpret the same document differently