ABSTRACT
Authors of social research methods, such as Judy Payne and Geoff Payne, describe documentary research as investigating, categorising, and interpreting written documents that are in the public domain. The use of sampling in qualitative research is to ‘refine ideas rather than to satisfy the demands of calculation’. For qualitative research studies, pragmatic and purposive sampling is used, which involves selecting the data purely to gain an insight into a process or organisation, rather than to provide a sample that is representative of the whole process. Alan Bryman writes that ‘one of the most notable developments in qualitative research has been the arrival of computer software that facilitates the analysis of qualitative data’. When undertaking latent content analysis in a research project, B. Berelson stated that whilst it is acceptable to directly infer latent meaning in the documents being analysed, the researcher must be aware of the obvious dangers in inferring an interpretation in latent content analysis.
