Documentary & Archival Research

This research tradition has arisen from a specific set of historical, disciplinary and institutional conditions. The very emergence of 'documentation' is predicated upon a set of long-term processes in which humans have developed the capacity to use symbols and store knowledge such that it can be exchanged and inter-generationally transmitted.Consisting of an impressive list of contributors, the four volumes discuss the history, development and current debates alive in the field, such as the biographical turn in social science, the theoretical underpinnings to using human documents in social research and the epistemological, substantive and practical concerns with the process of analyzing data from human documentary sources.Comprehensive, illuminating and dynamic, this collection will have appeal across all social science disciplines, especially sociology, social psychology, criminology, politics and international relations, management and business studies, human geography, media and communication studies

Volume One: Human Documents: Perspectives and Approaches

Volume Two: Analyzing Human Documents

Volume Three: Human Documents in Social Research

Volume Four: Archival Research and Data Re-Use

List of contents

VOLUME ONE: Human Documents - Perspectives and Approaches
Basic Themes: Use, Production and Content - Lindsay Prior
An Appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant in Europe and America - Herbert Blumer
Comment on Herbert Blumer's Appraisal - Florian Znaniecki
Nomothetic and Idiographic uses - G. Allport
The Use of Personal Documents in Historical Sociology - Hyman Marianpolski and Dana Hughes
To the Letter: Thomas and Znaniecki's the Polish Peasant and Writing a Life, Sociologically - Liz Stanley
For a Humanistic Way in Social Science - Ken Plummer
Evidence and Proof in Documentary Research: Part I - Some Specific Problems of Documentary Research - J. Platt
Evidence and Proof in Documentary Research: Part II - Some Shared Problems of Documentary Research - J. Platt
Biographical Turn in the Social Sciences? A British-European View - Tom Wengraf, Prue Chamberlayne and Joanna Bornat
Foucault and Critique: Kant, Humanism, and the Human Sciences - M. Olssen
Critical Humanism in a Post-Modern World - Ken Plummer
Assumptions of the Method - Norman Denzin
Autobiography and Biography - Brian Roberts
Auto/Biography and Sociology - Brian Roberts
The Social Science of Biographical Life-Writing: Some Methodological and Ethical Issues - Ann Oakley
Is There a Feminist Auto/Biography? - L. Stanley
Repositioning Documents in Social Research - Lindsay Prior
Historians and Oral History - P. Thompson
Constructing Credible Images: Documentary Studies, Social Research and Visual Studies - Jon Wagner
VOLUME TWO: Analysing Human Documents
Assessing Documentary Sources - John Scott
Analysing Documentary Realities - Paul Atkinson and Amanda Coffey
Doing Historical and Documentary Research - Ben Gidley
Content, Meaning and Reference - Lindsay Prior
An Introduction to Content Analysis - B. Berg and H. Lune
The Interpretation of Documents and Material Culture - Ian Hodder
Using Visual Methods and Documents - Jennifer Mason
The Interpretation of Pictures and the Documentary Method - Ralf Bohnsack
Comments on Elias's "Scenes from the Life of a Knight" - Eric Dunning
How to Look at Family Photographs: Practices, Objects, Subjects and Places - G. Rose
Videography: Analysing Video Data as a "Focused" Ethnographic and Hermeneutical Exercise - Hubert Knoblauch and Bernt Schnettler
What Is Discourse Analysis? - B. Paltridge
Theoretical Background - Linda Wood and Rolf Kroger
Exploring Conversations about and with Documents - Tim Rapley
The Epistolarium: On Theorizing Letters and Correspondences - Liz Stanley
Analyzing Biographies and Narratives - G. Gibbs
Pearls, Pith, and Provocation: Ethical Issues in the Documentary Data Analysis of Internet Posts and Archives - Judith Sixsmith and Craig Murray
Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0: Some Initial Considerations - D. Beer and R. Burrows
Towards a Sociological Understanding of Social Media: Theorizing Twitter - Dhiraj Murthy
VOLUME THREE: Human Documents in Social Research
Methods of Field Research 2: Interviews as Conversation - R. Burgess
"DEAR RESEARCHER": The Use of Correspondence as a Method within Feminist Qualitative Research - Gayle Letherby and Dawn Zdrodowski
Documents in Action I: Documents in Organisational Settings - Lindsay Prior
Documents in Action II: Making Things Visible - Lindsay Prior
The Journal Project: Research at the Boundaries between Social Sciences and the Arts - Judith Davidson
"Thanks for the Memory": Memory Books as a Methodological Resource in Biographical Research - Rachel Thomson and Janet Holland
Imagining The Sociological Imagination: The Biographical Context of a Sociological Classic - John Brewer
Introduction - M. Keen
Filling the Silences? Mass-Observations's Wartime Diaries, Interpretive Work and Indexicality - Andrea Salter
Autoethnography and Therapy Writing on the Move - Jeannie Wright
Narratives of the Night: The Use of Audio Diaries in Researching Sleep - J. Hislop, S. Arber, R. Meadows and S. Venn
Making Use of Audio Diaries in Research with Young People: Examining Narrative, Participation and Audience - N. Worth
The Photograph in Theory - E. Chaplin
Picture This: Researching Child Workers - Angela Bolton, Christopher Pole and Phillip Mizen
Mourning the Family Album - Tahneer Oksman
Good Young Nostalgia: Camera Phones and Technologies of Self among Israeli Youths - Ori Schwarz
Digital Biography: Capturing Lives Online - Paul Longley Arthur
Celebrity Bio Blogs: Hagiography, Pathography, and Perez Hilton - Elizabeth Podnieks
'My Vagina Makes Funny Noises': Analyzing Online Forums to Assess the Real Sexual Health Concerns of Young People - A. Cohn and J. Richters
VOLUME FOUR: Archival Research
Behind the Scenes: Records and Archives - G. McCulloch
Secondary Analysis of Archived Data - Louise Corti and Paul Thompson
Secondary Analysis of Qualitative Data - Clive Seale
The Ordinariness of the Archive - Thomas Osborne
Archive - Mike Featherstone
The Archive, Disciplinarity, and Governing: Cultural Studies and the Writing of History - Craig Robertson
Ethical Problems in Archival Research: Beyond Accessibility - Pamela Innes
Archival Research as a Social Process - N. Lerner
Keeping the Conversation Going: The Archive Thrives on Interviews and Oral History - B. Lucas and M. Strain
Museums, the Sociological Imagination and the Imaginary Museum - Gordon Fyfe
Ilya Neustadt, Norbert Elias, and the Leicester Department: Personal Correspondence and the History of Sociology in Britain - John Goodwin and Jason Hughes
On Behaviour at the Table - Norbert Elias
On the Relationship between Literature and Sociology in the Work of Norbert Elias - Helmut Kuzmics
Extracts from Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution in Britain - E. Pike
Writing to the Archive: Mass-Observation as Autobiography - Dorothy Sheridan
Using the Mass-Observation Archive as a Source for Women's Studies - Dorothy Sheridan
Research Methodology in Mass Observation Past and Present: "Scientifically, about as Valuable as a Chimpanzee's Tea Party at the Zoo? - Annebella Pollen
Working-Class Identities in the 1960s: Revisiting the Affluent Worker Study - Mike Savage
Data and Archives: The Internet as Site and Subject - Fiona Gill and Catriona Elder
Recent Developments in Archiving Social Research - Louise Corti

About the author

Jason Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in sociology, Brunel University. His first book, Learning to Smoke (University of Chicago Press, 2003) was the winner of the 2006 Norbert Elias prize. More recently, he has published on such topics as emotional intelligence, emotional labour, communities of practice, 'dirty work', moral panics, and 'figurational' sociology. He has recently completed, together with Eric Dunning, University of Leicester, a major study of the work of Norbert Elias Norbert Elias: Interdependence, Knowledge, Power, Process (Bloomsbury, 2012). His research interests relate to four central, overlapping, areas: organizational/industrial sociology; the sociology of emotions; the sociology of the body and health; and sociological theory. He has previously published on the topic of Internet research methods, and has more than 15 years experience of teaching and researching online. John Goodwin is a Reader in Sociology at the University of Leicester. As a sociologist, his principal research interests include the broad areas of the sociology of work, (especially education to work transitions and gender and work), social science research methods (life histories, work narratives, auto/biography, the re-use of qualitative and archival data) and the history of sociology. He has expertise in using biographical methods and has used narrative interviews and epistolary analysis in his research on Norbert Elias, Ilya Neustadt and his restudy of Elias's Adjustment of Young Workers to Adult Roles project. He is currently an editorial board member of the Journal of Youth Studies, Education and Training, and the European Journal of Industrial Training.

Summary

This collection successfully discusses the different ways documentation comes into being and how and why they become objects of social research. It emphasizes the interdisciplinary scale of the field as well as both its qualitative and its quantitative scope.

Product details

• Authors: Jason Hughes, Jason (EDT)/ Goodwin Hughes, Jason Goodwin Hughes, Jason Hughes, Jason Hughes & John Goodwin
• Assisted by: John Goodwin (Editor), Jason Hughes (Editor)
• Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 19.03.2014
• EAN: 9781446210949
• ISBN: 978-1-4462-1094-9
• No. of pages: 1544
• Series: Sage Benchmarks in Social Research Methods; Sage Benchmarks in Social Research Methods; Sage Benchmarks in Social Rese
• Subjects: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > IT, data processing > IT; Social sciences, law, business > Media, communication > Book trade, library system