The documents cover a wide range of secondary data, written and recorder material such as biographies, letters, novells, photos, radio and TV broadcasts. From interpretevists’ point of view, this type of data is very important and plays a significant role in their research methods since some kinds of documents are based on people’s understanding of the world and explains reasons for human’s behavior. Diaries, letters may help in understanding the past and compare how people’s views and attitudes are changed over the period of time. It helps to discover and interpret the meanings which guide people’s actions. There are different types of analysis of documents that are used by interpretevists: they might classify the content of the documents into different categories to make the data quantitative( Content analysis) This type of analysis might be valued by positivists since they see translating all the things into numbers as the most suitable way of research because it helps to make comparisons. Also intepretevists might pay more attention on the motives and ideologies of a particular document.( Thematic analysis) And some sociologists may be more interested in text analysis when looking at the text to understand how can it affect people’s ideas and create an impression.
However when using the documents, no one it is difficult to be sure whether what is written is genuine and sociologists can rely on that. While positivists by using Official statistics, will be surer that this data is valid and reliable.
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