ABSTRACT

In today’s society we increasingly create and consume written content and images. This includes a range of sources, from social media posts to records held within organisations, and everything in between, including news articles, blogs, shopping lists and official government documents. Critically reading these ‘documents’ can help us to understand a huge amount about society. Doing Excellent Social Research with Documents includes guidance on how to ‘read between the lines’, and provides an overview of six research projects which use documents as data.

Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at https://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. 

chapter 1|9 pages

Introduction

Documents, documents everywhere

chapter 2|24 pages

How to do excellent research with documents

General principles

part Section I|64 pages

Documents found in isolation from their authors

chapter 3|21 pages

Traditional media

Investigating the construction of societal norms

chapter 4|19 pages

Historical and official documents

Moving beyond simple interpretations

chapter 5|22 pages

Documents created by individuals

Collection and analysis of multi-modal content

part Section II|66 pages

Documents as an addition to existing qualitative research methods

chapter 6|24 pages

Triangulation of findings from primary research

Things we might not have otherwise been able to establish

chapter 7|21 pages

Documents in ethnographic research

Things we might not have been able to observe

chapter 8|21 pages

Participant-created documents as an elicitation tool

Things we might not have otherwise been told

part |18 pages

Conclusion