ABSTRACT
This chapter provides two case studies from the author's own dissertation students: one who worked with documentary data, and one who worked with secondary data. Documentation about our lives and the world around us is everywhere. From news stories, television programmes, books and social media, information about the social world is there for us to absorb, review and analyse. The types of data used by social researchers tend to be categorised as personal, official or media documents. All of these may include text-based documents as well as visual and virtual data. Official documents are of great interest and great potential significance to criminological researchers. For criminological researchers, there are some existing sources of data that may be particularly interesting in addressing our research questions. A researcher looking at an existing data source may be able to ask different questions and glean new information from the data.
