Document Analysis

In: The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods

By: Lindsay F. Prior

Edited by: Lisa M. Given
Book Title: The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods
Chapter Title: "Document Analysis"
Pub. Date: 2012
Access Date: September 13, 2017
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks
Print ISBN: 9781412941631
Online ISBN: 9781412963909
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412963909
Print pages: 231-232
©2008 SAGE Publications, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.
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Although documents often serve as key sources of social scientific data, their role in social
research is rarely highlighted. Indeed, consideration of their use is sometimes subsumed under
the amorphous heading of “unobtrusive” methods. In contrast, there are many well-defined
approaches to the analysis of speech. Although there is no obvious way to account for the
differing fortunes of speech and writing in research practice, it is worth noting that Barney
Glaser and Anselm Strauss, in their renowned description of grounded theory, considered
documents as on a par with an anthropologist's informant or a sociologist's interviewee.

The standard approach to the analysis of documents focuses primarily on what is contained
within them. In this frame, documents are viewed as conduits of communication between, say, a
writer and a reader—conduits that contain meaningful messages. Such messages are usually
in the form of writing but can engage other formats such as maps, architectural plans, films,
and photographs.

Although documents invariably contain information, it is also quite clear that each and every
document enters into human activity in a dual relation. First, documents enter the social field as
receptacles (of instructions, obligations, contracts, wishes, reports, etc.). Second, they enter
the field as agents in their own right, and as agents documents have effects long after their
human creators are dead and buried (e.g., wills, testaments). In addition, documents as agents
are always open to manipulation by others—as allies, as resources for further action, as
opponents to be destroyed or suppressed. (We should not forget that people burn, ban,
censor, and forge documents as well as read and write them.) Given these multiple facets of
documentation, it is not surprising that multiple methods are appropriate for their analysis.

The most straightforward approach to document content involves the adoption of some form of
content analysis. At its simplest, content analysis concentrates on word and phrase counts as
well as numerical measures of textual expression. More sophisticated approaches to document
analysis using strategies derived from the analysis of speech transcripts—involving, for
example, notions of grounded theory and thematic coding schemes—can also be applied to the
written word. At another level, discourse analysis is feasible.

The concept of discourse is a complicated one. Perhaps the best intellectual starting point for a
qualitative researcher is in the work of Michel Foucault (1926–1984). Although not an adherent
of discourse analysis in the methodological sense, Foucault was essentially interested in the
ways in which sets of ideas and concepts in science, medicine, and everyday culture tended to
cohere into determinate ways of seeing the world. More important, such “discursive formations,”
as he called them, were crucially linked to specific forms of social practice. In short, Foucault

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argued that what is written is inextricably locked into what is done. So, there is assumed to be
an essential connection among documents (and their contents), practical action, and sites of
action—all of which express aspects of a discursive formation. With this in mind, we can
consider three specific moments of documentation in social action: moments of production,
consumption (or use), and circulation.

The production of documents, such as statistical and other reports on crime, health, poverty,
and the environment, has figured as an object of study in numerous areas of social science
research. The standard research stance is to use such reports as a resource for further study—
as, say, a source of data on crime or health. Following the work of ethnomethodologists,
however, it is quite clear that documents as reports can also be usefully studied as a “topic.” In
the latter frame, the key questions revolve around how reports and accounts of the world are
actually assembled by social actors. What kinds of conceptual and technical operations
become involved in their production, and what range of assumptions is deployed so as to
achieve the end result of a “report”?

Issues concerning the consumption of documents often turn on matters of use and function. In
this frame, what is important is a study of the manner in which people use written (and
nonwritten) traces to facilitate or manage features of social organization—whether they be
transitory episodes of interaction or the ongoing functioning of a hospital, a business, or a
school. For example, in the field of medical sociology, there have been numerous studies
directed at showing the ways in which patient identities and diagnoses are often shored up
through the use of written traces in medical “charts” and patient files. The creation of identity
through documentation is also something that has figured prominently in the wider history of
qualitative social science.

Figure 1 Email Contacts Among General Practitioners in South Wales in 1999

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In the circulation or exchange of documents, whether they be greeting cards, memos, or

business files, it is possible to see the development of social networks and the emergence of
identifiable human groupings. For example, studies of citations in scientific papers have been
used to identify patterns of interaction (at least at the intellectual level) between groups of
scientists. Similar work using web-crawlers has been used by information scientists to identify
emergent research networks in specific scientific fields. By implication, it is conceivable that a
sociological study of e-mail contacts and text messaging contacts among the ordinary public
may also demonstrate how the exchange of text and documentation functions to both define
and to cement social groupings (Figure 1). It is, above all, in this context—and in the light of
actor–network theory—that documents may be conceptualized as actors in their own right,
shaping and channeling forms of interaction every bit as much as do humans. Indeed, actor–
network theory, commonly associated with the work of sociologists such as Michel Callon and
John Law, essentially argues that the networks of action that arise in everyday life cannot be
reduced to purely social relations, for “things” (e.g., documents, machines, chemical
compounds, currency) invariably function as intermediaries between humans. As such, the task
of the sociologist is to understand and determine how things, as well as people, “act” through
the network.

Lindsay F.Prior

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412963909.n120
See also

Content Analysis
Discourse Analysis
Ethnomethodology
Grounded Theory
Thematic Coding and Analysis
Unobtrusive Research

Further Readings

Plummer, K.(2001). Documents of life. London: Sage.

Prior, L.(2003). Using documents in social research. London: Sage.

Prior, L.(2004). Documents. I n Edited by: C.Seale,G.Gobo,J. F.Gubrium, &D.Silverman

(Eds.), Qualitative research practice (pp. 375–390).London: Sage

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