1. DOCUMENT ANALYSIS
DR SNG BEE BEE
SOURCE: GRAY, D.E. (2009), DOING RESEARCH IN THE REAL WORLD (2ND ED.). LONDON: SAGE SHANK, G.D. SHANK (2006), QUALITATIVE RESEARCH – A PERSONAL SKILLS APPROACH. U.S.A: PEARSON
Taught by Dr. Sng Bee Bee • Singapore Bible College Files in many languages for free download at BibleStudyDownloads.org

2. Analysing Artefacts and Documents
Every culture makes things for its use:
Buildings and dwellings
Toys and treasures
Gifts and weapons
Records of events and activities in words
Hodder (2000) – material culture: sum of artefacts that we find in a particular culture

3. Artefacts Artefacts is something someone has made to transform nature.
The transformation can be material, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, ideological or any of such combination.
Artefacts tell us something about the persons who made and used them.
Artefacts which communicate the most to us are words
These artefacts are known as documents and their study is called document analysis.

4. Artefacts of Qiang Tribe in China (the tribe that was hit by the massive earthquake, 2008)

5. Documents Documents are either formal or informal
Formal documents are called records

6. Archives Actuarial records: Birth, marriage and death data
Show us the pattern of life of people in the culture
Political and judicial records: voting data
Substantial record of criminal activity and legal responses to criminal behaviour
Mass media: newspaper, motion picture, television achives, music and interviews

7. Example of a study that used Actuarial Records
Webb et. al. (2000) referred to a study by Durkheim in 1951.
Durkheim used government records and showed how suicide rates were not so much linked to clinical depression, but to religion, season of the year, time of the day, race, sex, education and marital status.

8. Other types of document data: episodic and personal record
Common episodic records: business and commerce
Personal documents (created by individuals for private reasons): letters; letters to editors; diaries; social media; notes which give us understanding of day-to-day actions of people.
Sales records, industrial data, union records, records by schools and other institutions
Drawings: portraits, marginal sketches, and sketchbooks.

9. Sources of Personal Record
Contemporary Primary
Contemporary Secondary
Personal
Official
Letters, Suicide Notes
Court record, Minutes of Meeting
Edited transcripts of letters, talks, etc.
Research using census data
Retrospective Primary
Retrospective Secondary
Diary, Autobiography, Oral History
Novels, Historical archives
Research using diaries
Medical records
Newspaper reports

10. Strengths of Document Analysis as a Research Method
1. It is an unobtrusive research tool, i.e., the nature of a document is not affected by the fact that it is used for enquiry
2. It can be used to provide an official perspective of the issue. You can also compare this official view with the personal views you gathered in the interviews you conducted.
3. May (1997) -documents as can inform and structure the decisions that people make on a daily and longer-term basis
4. Documents offer interpretations of social events; inform the goals and intentions of the events, and describe relationships
Permanence
5.The data are in permanent form, hence they can be subject to reanalysis, and allow for reliability checks and studies.
Hodder (2002) described documents as evidence that survives physically.

11. Weaknesses of Document Analysis as a Research Method
Interpretations
Hodder (2002)- documents: gap between the author and reader; leading to multiple interpretations.
Words can say many things in different contexts; subject to transmission, manipulation and alteration.
No support from Non-Verbal
With written words, such non-verbal language is unavailable.
Written words are therefore prone to all kinds of interpretations and misinterpretations.
1. Purpose
Note: the documents are originally not written for research purposes. Researcher - should be aware of the original purpose they were written for. Documents should therefore be examined carefully, bearing in mind the weaknesses of such a research method.

12. Weaknesses of Document Analysis as a Research Method
Documents can be used and discarded, reused and recycled.

13. The Process of Document Analysis
Source of the Documents
Official versus Unofficial
Top, management perspective versus ground level perspective
Study multiple documents
an examination of several documents so that a comparison can be made, and a study of the historical period of the writing of the documents.
Inferences made about content of documents
May (1997) - right inferences must be made by taking into consideration context and perspectives of social events based on the period in which the documents are written.

14. Bryman and Bell’s (2007) checklist for document analysis:
1. Who produced the document?
2. Why was it produced?
3. Is the material genuine or is it written by someone who can write authoritatively and objectively on the subject?
Can be contents of the documents be compared with evidence in other documents?

15. Examine the following aspects of the documents
Date
Date of the document
Source
Whether it is first or second hand information; solicited or unsolicited; edited or unedited and anonymous or signed
Purpose
Purpose of the document

16. Examine the following aspects of the documents
Content
Context of the information; internal criterion of the text; coherence in argument; observations and interpretation of the text and the match between theory and data contained in the document.
Public or Private; Official/Unofficial Information
Comparison
Make a comparison amongst all the documents for consistency in perspectives and claims

17. The Process of Document Analysis
Important to identify the aims with which the documents were written.
Adopt a critical analysis of the text
Establish the initial purpose of the writing and how the information has been changed over time

18. Using the guidelines presented in previous slides analyse the document below

23. 6. examine use of metaphors
The Process of Analysing the Contents of Documents: A Qualitative Approach
3. categorizing
2. Identify themes
1.coding
6. examine use of metaphors
5. count frequency
4. look at variables

24. Ethics of Conducting Document Analysis
Respect the original aim and purpose of original writer
Observe the same ethics of confidentiality as the other qualitative research methods
Be aware that it is easy to manipulate the contents to suit the purpose of research
Criticism against D.A. as a research method: the context in which the data were collected (in the document) cannot be replicated.

25. Black

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