Historical and public documents are reports made by governments; companies; trade unions; schools; hospital trusts etc; therefore they can be contemporary (current) or historical (from the past).
Strengths of public and historical documents are:
- They are more than likely the only way we can gain insights into past events
- They allow comparisons over time for example birth; death and marriage rates
- They are useful when assessing the outcomes of various social policies such as raising the school leaving age
Weaknesses of public and historical documents
- The validity of the documents are open to question as they may have been written selectively
- The authenticity of a document is open to question as it might not have been written by the person it is attributed to; therefore undermining its reliability
- The documents content is open to misinterpretation
Diaries; letters; etc which provide a rich source of qualitative data on feeling; motives etc
Strengths
- Provide a rich insight into a person’s feelings and motivations
- They are usual in providing insights where no other data exists such as being held captive
- They are often the only insight sociologists have into the past such as war veterans diaries or letters home
- Personal documents can supplement official data such as school performance. A school might be high in league tables but pupils dislike the regime in which they learn
Weaknesses
- They are a one person view of events which can be biased in order to justify a person’s actions and therefore invalid
- The data is likely to be unreliable
- The data is likely to be unrepresentative
- The authenticity of the data is open to question
- The sociologist might interpret the data in a way the author never intended
Secondary data is produced by individuals or agencies and not sociologists. They come in various forms:
Triangulation is sometimes referred to as methodological pluralism
Triangulation is the use of one or more research method when carrying out social research in order for the different methods to complement each other.
For example Ofsted using overt observations as well as official data (exam results) to assess how well as school is performing. The trouble is triangulation produces a lot of data which takes a long time to process.
Content analysis involves the analysis of ‘messages’ in mass media content (secondary sources) which can generate both quantitative and qualitative data.
The sociologist can analyse any form of media content such as TV reports; newspaper reports; magazine content etc in order to see how a social group or social situation is portrayed.
The Glasgow University Media Group used this method to study TV news reports on industrial action so they could assess the content. Their study produced statistic evidence of television’s biases by portraying management in a positive light as more rational individuals while the workers in a negative way and so less rational.
This occurred through managers being interviewed in calm surroundings while the workers were often reported in nosier environments.
Have a go at assessing the SkyNews clip below. Evaluate the effect of the protester’s dress. Compare that with the journalists. Is the protester at a disadvantage being on his own when there’s two journalists asking him questions?
A popular source of secondary data for sociologists is the large amount of official statistics collected by national and local government for example births, death and marriage data as well as education data and crime data.
Advantages of official statistics
- they’re relatively easy and inexpensive to access
- they’re readily available
- they’re often the only source of data on a topic area
- as they’re so comprehensive they’re more likely to be representative
- they’re more likely to cover a long time span (crime figures and education data) and so it’s easier to see the influence of government policies ‘before and after’
Disadvantages of official data
- as official data isn’t collect by sociologists problems are likely in the recording and accuracy of the data, for example the British Crime Survey exists to overcome the ‘dark-figures’ of unrecorded crime
- some of these ‘dark figures’ come from policemen having to interpret a situation as being criminal or not. This shows how official data might not be as objective as expected
- officials recording data are doing so for administrate reasons and so they’re not using terms and classifications used by sociological researchers
- official figures are sometimes ‘massaged’ by the state to avoid embarrassing the government of the day for example hospital waiting times
sociologytwynham.com 