Documents and Content Analysis Flashcards
What are the 3 types of document?
Personal, historical and public
Practical advantage
May be the only available source of data
Free/cheap way of collecting lots of data
Practical disadvantage
Not always possible to gain access to them
May not contain the information the researcher wants because they are not made for them
Ethical advantage
Less emphasis on ethical considerations needed e.g. informed consent, right to withdraw
Ethical disadvantage
Leaked documents are unethical e.g. gov secrets and personal issues
Theoretical advantage
Interpretivists: more likely to be authentic because they are NOT made for the sociologist
Theoretical disadvantage
Scot: have have issues with credibilty e.g. diaries gloss over the author’s mistakes and if the document was made long after the event, some details may be inaccurate
What is content analysis?
A method of dealing with the contents from documents
What are the two types of content analysis
Formal (quantitative) and thematic (qualitative)
(CONTENT ANALYSIS) Practical adavantage
Both: cheap, easy to find resources from newspapers and TV broadcasts
(CONTENT ANALYSIS) Practical disadvantage
Both: Timeconsuming
(CONTENT ANALYSIS) Ethical advantage
No contact with participants which means that there is little risk of upsetting them
(CONTENT ANALYSIS) formal- theoretical advantage
Positivists: creates objective, accurate data which can be used to make generalisations
e.g. Best’s analysis of gender roles in children’s reading schemes found that there were fewer stereotypes for women
(CONTENT ANALYSIS) formal disadvantage
Interpretivists- social constructs because the creation of categories for content analysis are subjective processes involving the sociologists values
(CONTENT ANALYSIS) informal theoretical disadvantages
Popper: unscientific because the data selected only supports the researchers hypothesis
Positivists: sample size is too small so it is not representative or generalisable
