ABSTRACT

As well as the techniques discussed in previous chapters, social researchers can make use of a range of documentary sources. A document is essentially any written text, but as Scott (1990) notes, documents may ‘comprise a range of research sources, varied in origin and access, stretching from the archetypal government papers to the more marginal cases of photographs, invoices and stamps, and merging imperceptibly with printed ephemera and material remains’ (1990: 19). The state produces official documents (not just statistics but also reports of various kinds) which can be used by sociologists, political scientists and historians. White papers and the Hansard Records (transcripts of speeches in the Houses of Parliament) are also useful sources. Prisons, schools, churches, organisations like the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), trade unions and particular firms, also keep records (annual reports and accounts, the minutes of meetings, lists of employee or membership numbers, contract documents and so on) which can provide vital information. Such documents are often the only source of certain information. Researchers are unlikely to find an informant who would be able to tell them, without checking the documentary records, what proportion of the company’s workforce had been engaged in manual work every year for the past two decades, or how union membership figures for 1953 compare with those for 1993. Other documentary sources from the public sphere include those which are ‘regarded as media for mass communication’ such as newspapers, books, pamphlets, magazines (and more recently film, television programmes and videos) as well as others ‘with more limited circulation, such as directories, almanacs and yearbooks’ (Scott 1990: 137). Personal documents, such as letters, diaries, household accounts, personal memoirs, family photos and portraits and address books can also be used to give some insight into family life, business and politics in a specific period, to generate hypotheses, to provide illustrations of more general points and so on. There exists, then, a multitude of documentary sources which can be exploited in the course of research, and the classical sociologists made extensive use of them. Durkheim used official suicide statistics, Weber used religious tracts and pamphlets to support his arguments about the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, and in the first volume of Capital alone, Marx:

cites thirty reports of HM Inspectors … five reports of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council on public health … reports of select committees, Royal Commissions, and others on the adulteration of food, on the baking trade, mines, railways and agricultural labourers, the employment of children in factories, the Banking Acts, and the Corn Laws; the report of the Commissioners on Transportation and Penal Servitude (1863); Inland Revenue Reports … the report of the Social Science Congress in Edinburgh (1863); the Report of the Committee of the Master Spinners’ and Manufacturers’ Defence Fund (1854); and the report of the Registrar General on births, death and marriages in England…. Finally he cites Correspondence with Her Majesty’s Missions Abroad regarding Industrial Questions and Trades Unions (1867) and Hansard.

( Harvey 1990: 42)