Doing Excellent Social Research with Documents

Practical Examples and Guidance for Qualitative Researchers

Aimee Grant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351709897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

In today's society we increasingly create and consume written content and images. This includes a range of sources, from social media posts to records held within organisations, and everything in between, including news articles, blogs, shopping lists and official government documents. Critically reading these 'documents' can help us to understand a huge amount about society. Doing Excellent Social Research with Documents includes guidance on how to 'read between the lines', and provides an overview of six research projects which use documents as data.

Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1

INTRODUCTION

Documents, documents everywhere

Summary

This chapter opens by considering if this book will be relevant for your research. Next, I provide an example of the documents that I engaged with on one particular day. This supports the conclusion that documents are everywhere in developed societies and can therefore help us to understand a wide range of phenomena. Following this, I explain the need for this book and the way in which it varies from other books that are available. Finally, the chapter ends with a description of the structure of the book and provides a detailed outline of the remaining eight chapters.

Is this book for me?

Doing Excellent Social Research with Documents is intended for those of you who are about to begin a project using documents as data, including students and faculty, as well as those of you supervising students who are doing research using documents. The book may also have value for those of you who already have experience in doing research with documents, particularly if you feel that you have been ‘improvising’ methodologically. At a broader level, this book will have relevance for teaching research methods at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, where students are already versed in the basics of qualitative research methods. This book is not bound by any one academic discipline and aims to be accessible to any discipline using documents as data. If you are a historian, however, there are other books that describe doing research with historical documents in more detail, and you should consult them too (see, for example, Brundage 2018).

Once you have identified a topic area of interest for your research, this book will provide tools to help you think about refining your research questions to fit the documentary data source(s) available to you. It also outlines a range of analysis techniques, providing a breakdown of the processes that need to be undertaken and refers to more detailed sources that can provide further help. This should help you to think about the aims of your research project and which analysis strategy would, therefore, be most appropriate.

I understand that not everyone will have time to read a whole book, particularly when you are keen to get ‘stuck in’ to analysing your documents. If you are short of time, it is recommended that, before planning your project, you read Chapters 2 and 9 and at least one chapter from Section I (if your research uses documents found away from their authors) or Section II (if you use documents to triangulate knowledge or use visual methods). If you have already started your project and you find yourself feeling a bit methodologically unsure, I would also suggest reading those chapters. That said, if you can find the time to read the entire book, you will benefit from reading all six case study chapters (Chapters 3–8) in order to better understand how research questions, data sources and analysis strategies can be planned when using different types of documents. In Chapter 9 (pp. 175–177), a checklist is provided that will help you to think through how to do your research at each stage of the project to ensure considerations relating to research questions, quality and bias within data sources, analysis strategy, ethics, write up and impact are addressed. Also, a glossary is provided to help remind you of the definitions of key terms used throughout the book; words found in the glossary are in bold print.

By using this book, you should avoid some of the pitfalls and mistakes that could otherwise cost you valuable time and effort. A considered approach to your research with documents is also likely to improve the quality of your research, and thus your likelihood of a good grade, a paper being accepted by a peer-reviewed journal or your research having an impact on policy and practice. This chapter now moves on to consider where we find documents in everyday life.

Documents, documents everywhere!

I think documents are great data, but you might not (yet!) be convinced that you should use documents in your research project. One reason that documents make great data is that they are literally everywhere in developed societies and can therefore tell us a lot about a broad range of phenomena. Alongside the paper documents we produce in vast quantities, our increasingly digital lives mean that the volume of ‘documents’, if we include digital content, is still continuing to increase year-on-year. In order to understand the potential of including documents in your research studies as data, I have listed the documents that I have interacted with or produced today (a Sunday, over a public holiday weekend). I have:

• tweeted and shared the tweets of others
• commented on photos posted by friends on Facebook
• shared posts related to the forthcoming UK general election on Facebook
• emailed multiple colleagues, catching up on the previous week
• written a shopping list
• exchanged a long conversation via a messenger application with my sister
• taken digital photos of DIY projects and shared these with my parents
• drafted a press release to go alongside a piece of research I led which will soon be published
• completed an application form to enter a half marathon
• written a to-do list for the forthcoming month
• edited and finalised Chapter 7 of this book
• commented on a draft journal article written by a colleague of mine

Each of these documents had a very different purpose. This was related to their intended audience and subject matter. For example, my use of social media is polarised. My Twitter account is exclusively academic, whilst my Facebook profile is around 90% non-academic, consisting of friends and family. When I post to Twitter, I undertake various roles. I show that I am a member of Cardiff University and promote our successes. I also undertake (sometimes shameless!) self-promotion in order to spread the findings of my research as widely as possible. Even more shamelessly, I have tweeted that I think it is a ‘genius idea’ for me to highlight the importance of documents in social life, by describing my own interactions with them. By their very nature, we expect the things that we write on social media to be viewed by others. In contrast, I expect that my shopping list and to-do list will remain largely private. Likewise, the conversations that I have with my family and the emails to colleagues I expect to have a much more select audience.

As the expected audience varies by each of these data sources, we might expect that the author’s rationale for writing in particular ways would vary. In my example above, when I email colleagues, I may use varying levels of formality, depending on my pre-existing relationship with the individual, whether I feel that it may need to be copied in to somebody more senior at a later date or if I also have a non-professional relationship with that person outside of work. Some of my most long-standing colleagues are close friends, and I may dispense entirely with formalities and even use ‘kisses’ at the end of emails about work-related matters, but if I were to add a second colleague to these emails, they would return to the standard, accepted level of formality, regardless of the pre-existing friendships. This is because we present different versions of ourselves depending on the anticipated audience. For example, it has been shown that on some social media platforms, individuals present an idealised form of themselves, as will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5.

To wrap up this section, I would suggest that documents are, like love in the 1995 Wet Wet Wet¹ song, literally all around us in contemporary developed societies. The extent to which one interacts with documents may vary by age, occupation, education level and health status. However, most people in developed, and many developing, societies will interact with at least one document every day. As you are reading this book, I imagine that you will also have read and/or created at least ten documents so far today (or yesterday, if you’re reading this over breakfast). By delving into the relationship between individuals, documents and society, we can learn about society in ways that we may not be able to through other qualitative methods.

Exercise: considering your interaction with documents

Now maybe an opportune moment for you to make a list, or a mental list, of the documents that you have written (including digital content), read or interacted with in some way over the past day, and to think about their purpose in your life. There is no right or wrong answer here, but you may feel that there were some documents you assume would be public and others that you assume would be relatively private. This may help you think about the way that you write for yourself and the way you write for a range of broader audiences.

Why there is a need for this book

I decided to write this book for several reasons, the most important of which is that I have discovered that documents are excellent data to understand society. Alongside this, they are very accessible to those who need quick and easy access to some data for a dissertation or suchlike. As many students and researchers use documents as data, but very few people are (academically) talking about how to do this, I thought that I should share what I’ve learned. This book comprises lessons from existing books and articles and my own strategies for doing research with documents.

Despite the benefits of using documents as data, I also have first-hand experiences of the challenges of using documents as data. I used documents as data during my doctoral research (Grant 2011a), which reported on the experiences of benefit (welfare) claimants (Grant 2011b; Grant 2012), welfare advisers (Grant 2013a) and National Health Service (NHS) health professionals (Grant 2013b) who were involved in the rollout of the Welfare Reform Act 2007. My PhD research utilised an interpretivist ethnographic approach. I undertook periods of non-participant observation within welfare offices, and (electronic) documents were used extensively by the welfare advisers prior to, during and after each meeting with a claimant. Alongside this, some claimants gave me permission to access their case files from the NHS back-to-work programme they attended (as will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 7), and I drew on policy documents extensively to contextualise the experiences of claimants and workers.

Together, these data sources provided a well-rounded account of how the policy was implemented in practice. However, when it came to the case files, I didn’t know what to do to analyse them. I read the two core texts recommended by my supervisors (Scott 1990; Prior 2003), which provided important information in terms of quality and bias within the documents (Scott 1990) and helped to contextualise the way the documents shaped the behaviour of those responsible for implementing the Welfare Reform Act (Prior 2003). I also consulted a four-volume collection of examples of documentary analysis in a wide variety of settings, which opened my eyes to a broad range of data sources and analysis strategies (Scott 2006). But I still felt confused as to exactly what practical steps were required to analyse my documents in a rigorous way. I was also unsure how I should report my findings as they came from differing sources, all of which were affected by varying forms of bias. This was in contrast to interview data, of which there were considerably detailed accounts available that explained how to do analysis.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to present this data to the Qualitative Analysis Research Group, hosted at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, which was chaired at the time by William Housley. I took one of the case files, the smallest file, to the group. In my field notes from that day, I noted that the data had been described as “fascinating”, “rich”, “illuminating” but also “overwhelming”. In order to complete my PhD on t...