Research Methods: Documentary, Empirical and Survey

In one line

A researcher can work from documents somebody else produced, from direct observation of behaviour, or by asking a sample of people questions.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the documentary method studies social phenomena through existing written and recorded materials, whether personal documents such as letters, diaries and autobiographies, or public documents such as official records, statistics, reports, newspapers and archives. The empirical method studies phenomena through direct observation and the collection of first-hand data in the field. The survey method collects information from a sample of a defined population by putting standardised questions, and generalises from the sample to the population.

1. The documentary method

Its sources

Personal documents: letters, diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, life histories, photographs, and now digital records. Their value is that they express the writer's own view of their situation, which is why Thomas and Znaniecki's study of Polish migrants, built on letters and life histories, is the classic instance of the method.

Public documents: census reports, official statistics, government and committee reports, court records and judgments, land and municipal records, registers, minutes, newspapers, and organisational archives.

Its merits

1. The only route to the past. No other method reaches a period the researcher cannot observe.
2. Cheap and quick, since the material already exists.
3. Unobtrusive. The document was not produced for the researcher, so it is free of the observer effect and of the desire to please an interviewer, which is its most important scientific advantage.
4. Large coverage. Official statistics cover populations no survey could afford to reach.
5. Verifiable, since another worker can consult the same document.
6. Indispensable for legal research, since judgments, statutes and official reports are documents.

Its limitations

1. The material was produced for another purpose, so it rarely answers exactly the question asked.
2. Selective survival. What survives is not a random sample of what existed: the records of the powerful and the literate survive, and those of the poor and the unlettered do not, which biases every documentary study of the past.
3. Authenticity and authorship must be established before use.
4. Accuracy cannot be assumed. A record may be wrong, or deliberately false.
5. Recording practices change, so a series may reflect a change in how a thing was counted rather than in the thing, which is exactly the caution about crime statistics in [Crime and Social Deviance].
6. Categories are the recorder's, not the researcher's, and they carry the assumptions of those who made them, which is the point made about colonial census categories in [Caste].

2. The empirical method

What it is

The collection of first-hand data by direct contact with the phenomenon: observing behaviour where it occurs, recording what happens, and measuring it. Where the documentary method takes what exists, the empirical method produces new data.