Documents

Documents are secondary data and are favoured by interpretivists. These are created to gain insights into social and historical contexts and provide both qualitative and quantitative research

Personal documents take the form of diaries, memoirs, autobiographies and letters

Advantages

Cost effective- No need to collect new data

Good for historical analysis

High validity

Good for historical analysis

Disadvantages

Authenticity concerns- Documents may be altered or incomplete

Interpretation bias- Researchers may analyse the same documents differently

Access issues- Some records may be restricted

Historical bias

Historical documents provide evidence from the past

Advantages

They allow comparisons over time (birth, death and marriage rates)

Useful for assessing outcomes of various social policy’s

Disadvantages

Un-representative- Some documents may get lost or destroyed

The validity of the documents are open to the question as the 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 is attributed to, therefore lowering its reliability