Types of Documents

Types of Documents: Public Records

Public records, personal documents, and physical material are three major types of documents available to the researcher for analysis. Moreover, a researcher can create documents for the purpose of the investigation.

Public Records

Public records are "the ongoing, continuing records of a society". As Guba and Lincoln (1981) note, "The first and most important injunction to anyone looking for official records is to presume that if an event happened, some record of it exists". Public documents include actuarial records of births, deaths, and marriages, the U.S. census, police records, court transcripts, agency records, association manuals, program documents, mass media, government documents, and so on. Locating public records is limited only by the researcher's imagination and industriousness. Auster (1985), for example, demonstrates how to conduct a study of changing social expectations for family, career, gender roles, and sexual behavior through the sole handbooks. Youth organization handbook, "represent the intersection of biography providing an excellent data source for studying skill mores.

For those in educational questions, there are numerous sources documents discussions of educational issues and bills in Record; federal, state, and private agency reports; individual program records; and the statistical database Educational Statistics. Since many case studies are at level, it is particularly important to seek out the paper nail for what it can reveal about the program—"things that cannot be observed," things "that have taken place before the evaluation began. They may include private interchanges to which the educator would not otherwise be priw. They can reveal goals or decisions that might be unknown to the evaluator". Ideally this paper trail includes "all routine records on clients, all correspondence from and to program staff, financial and budget records, organizational rules, regulations, memoranda, charts, and any oilier official or unofficial documents generated by or for the program". Such documents not only provide valuable information about the program itself, but they can also stimulate thinking "about important questions to pursue through more direct observations and interviewing".

If you were interested in studying the role of parent involvement in a neighborhood school, for example, you could look for public record documents in the form of the following: notices sent home to parents; memos between and among teachers, staff, and the parents' association; formal policy statements regarding parent involvement; school bulletin boards or other displays featuring aspects of parent involvement; newspaper and other media coverage of activities featuring parent involvement; and any official records of parent attendance or presence in the school.

Other sources of public information that are easily accessible but often overlooked include previous studies and data "banks" of information. However, in using these resources the researcher has to rely on someone else's description and interpretation of data rather than use the raw data as a basis for analysis. These meta-analyses, as they are called, are more common in quantitative research, although there has been some recent thinking as to how this strategy might apply to qualitative studies. For large-scale or cross-cultural research, relying on previous studies may be the only realistic way to conduct the investigation.

An example of a data bank that is potentially useful in qualitative research, especially ethnographic studies (see Chapter One), is the Human Relations -Area File (Murdock, 1983; Murdock and others, 1982). This file is a compilation of ethnographic studies of more than 350 societies; data are classified and coded by cultural group and also by more than 700 topics. Education is one broad topic under which such subtopics as elementary education, educational theory and methods, students, and vocational education can be found. The index is organized so that a researcher can retrieve documents related to the educational practices of one particular cultural group, or documents can be retrieved about a specific practice such as "student uprisings" across many cultures. Types of documents found in this file include ethnographer field notes, diary entries, reports to various agencies, books, newspaper articles, and works of fiction about the culture, and photographs.

"Even literate society," writes Kidder (1981b), "produces a variety of material intended to inform, entertain, or persuade the populace" (p. 286). Popular media forms such as television, films, radio, newspapers, literary works, photography, cartoons, and the like are another source of "public" data. Mass communication materials are especially good sources for dealing with questions about some aspect of society at a given time, for comparing groups on a certain dimension, or for tracking cultural change and trends. They "concentrate on what is of current interest, and that concentration makes it possible to track many phenomena and index the growth and decline of public interest in them". Studies have been conducted, for example, on the roles of blacks in television, the presence of ageism in cartoons, and teenage culture in movies.