Quantitative Research Methods ‘Modelling data’: from source to essay

Data Modelling  Historical source material offers much potential for analysis but also many challenges…  Unstructured source material  Missing data  Complications with numbers and dates  Data comes from more than one source

Some sources translate easily into a database for further analysis Voter IDFirst NameSurnameAddressOccupationVoting Preference 001JohnSmithHalifaxButcherWhig 002DavidEvansLeedsDealerLiberal 003CharlesElliottYorkGlazierTory 004BenjaminPostanBradfordMerchantRadical Unique identifier or primary key Column or field or attribute Row or record Field name or attribute name Nineteenth-century Yorkshire poll book

But what do you do with this? Probate Inventory, Staffordshire (1573)

Don’t panic! This is where data modelling or source analysis comes in.  Data should be broken down into components that collects groups of information into objects or events.  For example information relating to a person, an organisation, a document, an object or a building, or to events such as a marriage, a transaction, the making of a will, or an election.  In database terminology these are referred to as entities.  Each entity will form a table in the final database.

Once you have your main components, then you can start creating your tables for further analysis  Once each entity has been identified, list the data associated with each.  For example, there may be information on the first name, surname, address, age, sex and occupation of each person in a table relating to individuals.  This information will produce the fields (or columns) for each table.  The fields are also known as attributes.

A simple table (this could be analysed using Excel) Voter IDFirst NameSurnameAddressOccupationVoting Preference 001JohnSmithHalifaxButcherWhig 002DavidEvansLeedsDealerLiberal 003CharlesElliottYorkGlazierTory 004BenjaminPostanBradfordMerchantRadical Unique identifier or primary key Column or field or attribute Row or record Field name or attribute name

Or something more complex (use Access to analyse these tables) Sentence Table Defendant ID Case Number Verdict Sentence Comments Offences Table Defendant ID Case Number Offence Type Place of Offence Date of Offence Description Comments Occupational Categorisation Table Occupation Title Occupational Categorisation 1 Occupational Categorisation 2 Witnesses Table Case Number Witness 1 First name Witness 1 Surname Witness 1 Address Witness 1 Sex Witness 2 First name Witness 2 Surname Witness 2 Address Witness 2 Sex Comments Defendant Table Defendant ID First name Surname Address Age Sex Occupation Title Comments

Probate inventories Material culture Wealth Occupations Patterns of consumption Farming and agriculture The world of goods Slaves and servants Gun culture Book ownership and literacy The history of private life The domestic interior Credit and debt Evolution of buildings and housing

A simple probate inventory table Wilmington, Delaware probate inventories Wilmington, Delaware probate inventories (Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries)

A more complex structure From Margot Finn’s ‘Consumption in British India’ project

What determines the structure of your final table(s)?  Questions you want to answer (thus if you are only interested in gun ownership you might omit other details from inventories)  Information in the source  Extra information that may enrich the source material (categorisations of material, links to other documents)  Size of tables – are you happy working with one very big table or a series of smaller ones?

Social Status All inventories WomenRuralMean Total Value Mean Value of Household goods Gentry Trades of high status Yeomen Husbandmen Labourers Widows or spinsters From Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, (London: Routledge,1988)