Document Research: A Description of Procedures for Gathering and Analysing Mute Evidence

Abstract

Although document study is a widely employed research method, it is not as much written about in methodological literature as it perhaps should, given its usefulness as a powerful means of gathering quantitative as well as qualitative data. Some scholars choose to look at documentary research as simply exploring secondary sources of data, while questionnaires, interviews, observations, and other conventional methods are recognised as the primary sources (see for example, Wellington, 2006, p. 109). In this paper, I describe the main aspects of documentary research to show how complex it is and how, in fact, it can be a process of exploring primary sources of data. In doing so, I draw upon a number of scholarly works on documentary research, particularly in the educational context. Based on ideas borrowed from these works, the paper describes eight different aspects of document study, namely - considering a useful framework for interrogating documents, identifying and classifying documents, following ethically sound procedures for accessing documents, assessing the quality of documents, and searching for meaning. The paper presents a brief description of two popularly employed methods of constructing meaning in document research, namely thematic analysis and content analysis. The paper then states very briefly the limitations of document research. To place the discussion in context, I refer to the secondary English curriculum and the infusion of Gross National Happiness (GNH) values and principles in it as an example. The paper concludes that documents can also be the central focus of research, and not merely used in conjunction with other sources of data such as interviews, surveys, or observations.