A third criterion, representativeness, seeks to determine whether the document is typical of such accounts—perhaps described as “reliable”—and whether the material represents a collection of produced materials rather than an idiosyncratic portrayal. A document’s representativeness may be distorted with the passing of time as the survival rate of certain materials becomes greater since the items may have been viewed as less valuable and, thus, stored away, rarely seen after their point of origination, and thus preserved. The acquisitions process—archival staff members “weeding” the collection (eliminating what are considered non-essential items)—may also distort provenance and representativeness. Similarly, some important documents do not survive because their great significance caused them to become used and worn and, subsequently, discarded while less important documents survive because they are so little used. Matters of generalizability and reliability are constantly hovering above documentary researchers as they examine materials and decide what items should be drawn upon in their work. Interestingly, Scott (2006) recognizes that determining whether documents are fully authentic, credible, and representative may never be able to be confirmed by the researcher; thus, he reverses the process and asks whether the materials may be deemed as inauthentic, non-credible, or unrepresentative. This has led to a perspective described as “methodological distrust” where researchers take a general approach of questioning all materials and demanding that documents must prove their own authenticity, credibility, and representativeness before being used.
A final criterion—meaning—represents the textual analysis of the document and whether the evidence is clear and comprehensible. Coupled with this semiotic and intertextual examination is whether the document’s content is appropriately situated within its historical context; this is ascertained, in part, by the method in which meaning is constructed and perceived by its originally intended audience. While these four criteria are fundamental, McCullough (2004) underscores a fifth criterion of document analysis: theorization—the anticipated theoretical, hermeneutic framework for interpreting the material. Such theoretical perspectives are commonplace for those in the field of curriculum studies. Documentary research, however, underscores an important dimension to theorization and the construction of meaning of a document: the reconstruction of a text’s meaning as it moves from author to audience. Scott (2006) notes the transition of intended content (the author’s intended meaning), the received content (meaning as constructed by the reader/perceiver), and internal meaning (transactional understandings derived from the intended and received meanings).
Related analysis and assessment of documents occurs as materials are ascertained as being public or private, primary or secondary (noting that a primary source need not be the sole original document; primary materials are first-hand documents), and whether the researcher has direct-proximate contact (being able to examine the original or primary document) or indirect-mediate access (facsimile or scanned e-version).
The Biographical and Documentary Research SIG will be making a concerted effort to develop further our involvement and programming in the area of documentary research theory. We encourage all members to begin exploring this research realm. A wonderful introduction to this area is (SIG member) Gary McCulloch’s
Austin, T. & de Jong, W. (2008). . London: Open University Press.
Hill, M. R. (1993). . Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.
McCulloch, G. (2004). . London: RoutledgeFalmer.
Nichols, B. (2001). . Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Scott, J. P. (Ed.). (2006). . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
By Craig Kridel, University of South Carolina
Social scientists often conduct documentary research. Its primary use is to assess various documents in the interest of social or historical value. Researchers also conduct documentary research to study multiple documents surrounding events or individuals.
Documentary research is the research conducted through the use of official documents or personal documents as the source of information.
Documents can include anything from the following:
The above may not fit the traditional bill of a “document”, but companies can use them towards documentary research since they contain information.
Documentary research is similar to content analysis, which involves studying existing information recorded in media, texts, and physical items. Here, data collection from people is not required to conduct research. Hence, this is a prime example of secondary research.
It is essential to consider the quality of the documents while using it as evidence on social relations and social meanings. Keep in mind that, unlike surveys and research interviews, the records are originally published/generated without keeping the purpose of research in mind. It is good practice to cross-verify documents against other similar documents before reaching a decision.
Bellow, we can find a few real-life examples of documentary research applied to companies’ daily events.
Although documentary research is not used extensively today, it is the go-to research method to conduct social research studies. For example, Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim used documentary research extensively for their research.
Karl Marx used documents like:
There’s also a record of his use of reports by the Medical Officer of the Privy Council, reports on children’s employment in factories, the Corn-laws, the Banking Acts, and Census Reports for Wales and England to name a few.
Durkheim, one of the founders of Sociology, wrote a book on suicide, which is recognized as the first modern example of a methodical and consistent use of documents for social research.
The field of sociology has a popular, longstanding tradition of documentary inquiry. Many historians refer to and rely on primary documents for their research. Historians give historical documents more emphasis while conducting research. Of course, as we evolve, virtual documents like emails will play a significant role in research activities conducted by these researchers.
Documentary research is not limited to text only. Pictures, paintings, videos, audio files, monuments are also used to conduct research. Documentary researchers use these tools in addition to texts while studying social sciences. The use of these tools adds to the authenticity of the textual research, or may very well point out deviations in the findings.
This deviation suggests that investigators research more to draw accurate conclusions.
Documentary research, if conducted thoroughly, can help develop a hypothesis or prove or disprove an existing theory. This of course depends on the methodology applied and the depth of research conducted. The researcher must conduct his/her own secondary research to analyze the contents before extracting it. They must handle the data scientifically.
Follow this four-step approach to control the quality of the content:
The authenticity of the documents
The credibility of the documents
Representativeness of the documents
The meaning derived from the documents
Let’s take a look at these in detail.
Authenticity implies whether the document’s origin is reliable, is the evidence genuine, are the intentions sincere, and what were the commitments to creating the document. The authenticity of the source is the primary criterion of documentary research.
Credibility means the subjective and objective components that make one believe the source of information and whether the data is free from distortion and error. The information must be trustworthy and must have some level of expertise.
Representativeness refers to whether the document represents a more extensive collection of the data point, and it is an aggregation of the topic being studied. That said, documents get distorted with time due to the inclusion of new factors, and a check has to be made to ensure the documents are representative.
Meaning means whether the findings are understandable and clear to be called evidence. The goal of examining documents is to understand its significance and meaning. Researchers must find out whether the document fits within the historical context or not.
Here are the advantages of the documentary research method:
Here are the disadvantages of the documentary research method:
QuestionPro provides the best market research platform to uncover complex insights that can propel your business to the forefront of your industry.
START A FREE TRIAL
Jun 10, 2024
Jun 7, 2024
Jun 5, 2024
Jun 3, 2024
Related overviews.
life history
content analysis
Show all results sharing these subjects:
Quick reference.
Research that uses personal and official documents as a source material. Documents used by social scientists may include such things as newspapers, diaries, stamps, directories, handbills, maps, government statistical publications, photographs, paintings, gramophone records, tapes, and computer files.
The most important consideration in using documents is their quality as evidence on social meanings and social relations. Unlike survey questionnaires or interview transcripts, documents have generally been compiled for purposes other than research, and their value must be thoroughly assessed before they can be used. It has been suggested that documents must be assessed against four criteria: authenticity, credibility, representativeness, and meaning (see John Scott, A Matter of Record, 1990). The criterion of authenticity involves assessing documents for their soundness and authorship. Soundness refers to whether the document is complete and whether it is an original or a sound copy. Authorship concerns issues of forgery or fraud and matters of collective or institutional authorship. Authorship is assessed through both internal evidence on vocabulary and literary style and external evidence from chemical tests on paper and ink. The criterion of credibility concerns the sincerity and accuracy of a document. All documents are selective, as it is impossible to construct accounts independent of particular standpoints, but they can be more or less credible as accounts, depending on the motives from which a point of view is adopted and whether the account gives an accurate report from that standpoint. To assess the accuracy of a report it is necessary to look at the conditions under which it was compiled and, in particular, how close the author was to the events reported. The criterion of representativeness involves an assessment of the survival and availability of relevant documents. It is important to know whether the documents consulted are representative of all the relevant documents that once existed, and this depends upon what proportion of the relevant documents have been stored or retained and whether they are available for researchers to use. The availability of official documents may often be limited by considerations of confidentiality and official secrecy. The meaning of documents is the most important matter and arises at two levels. The first level is the literal understanding of a document, by which is meant its physical readability, whether it is in a language that can be read, and such issues as dating. Once this practical matter has been resolved the more fundamental interpretative meaning must be addressed. Interpretation is a hermeneutic task through which an appreciation of the social and cultural context and forms of discourse that structure a text is reached. This involves methods of textual analysis and content analysis.
A useful recent overview of documentary research can be found in Lindsay Prior's Using Documents in Social Research (2003). Scott's A Matter of Record covers the issues involved in handling a range of documents, while Ken Plummer's Documents of Life, 2 (2001) gives good coverage of personal documents. See also life-history; personal documents.
From: documentary research in A Dictionary of Sociology »
Subjects: Social sciences — Sociology
Reference entries.
View all related items in Oxford Reference »
Search for: 'documentary research' in Oxford Reference »
PRINTED FROM OXFORD REFERENCE (www.oxfordreference.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2023. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single entry from a reference work in OR for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice ).
date: 11 June 2024
Character limit 500 /500
An official website of the United States government
The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.
The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.
Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .
Sarah l dalglish.
1 Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, 615 N. Wolfe St, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA
2 Institute for Global Health, University College London, Institute for Global Health 3rd floor, 30 Guilford Street, London WC1N 1EH, UK
3 School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Information Technology University, Arfa Software Technology Park, Ferozepur Road, Lahore 54000, Pakistan
4 Heidelberg Institute of Global Health, Medical Faculty and University Hospital, University of Heidelberg, Im Neuenheimer Feld 130/3, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany
Document analysis is one of the most commonly used and powerful methods in health policy research. While existing qualitative research manuals offer direction for conducting document analysis, there has been little specific discussion about how to use this method to understand and analyse health policy. Drawing on guidance from other disciplines and our own research experience, we present a systematic approach for document analysis in health policy research called the READ approach: (1) ready your materials, (2) extract data, (3) analyse data and (4) distil your findings. We provide practical advice on each step, with consideration of epistemological and theoretical issues such as the socially constructed nature of documents and their role in modern bureaucracies. We provide examples of document analysis from two case studies from our work in Pakistan and Niger in which documents provided critical insight and advanced empirical and theoretical understanding of a health policy issue. Coding tools for each case study are included as Supplementary Files to inspire and guide future research. These case studies illustrate the value of rigorous document analysis to understand policy content and processes and discourse around policy, in ways that are either not possible using other methods, or greatly enrich other methods such as in-depth interviews and observation. Given the central nature of documents to health policy research and importance of reading them critically, the READ approach provides practical guidance on gaining the most out of documents and ensuring rigour in document analysis.
Document analysis (also called document review) is one of the most commonly used methods in health policy research; it is nearly impossible to conduct policy research without it. Writing in early 20th century, Weber (2015) identified the importance of formal, written documents as a key characteristic of the bureaucracies by which modern societies function, including in public health. Accordingly, critical social research has a long tradition of documentary review: Marx analysed official reports, laws, statues, census reports and newspapers and periodicals over a nearly 50-year period to come to his world-altering conclusions ( Harvey, 1990 ). Yet in much of social science research, ‘documents are placed at the margins of consideration,’ with privilege given to the spoken word via methods such as interviews, possibly due to the fact that many qualitative methods were developed in the anthropological tradition to study mainly pre-literate societies ( Prior, 2003 ). To date, little specific guidance is available to help health policy researchers make the most of these wells of information.
The term ‘documents’ is defined here broadly, following Prior, as physical or virtual artefacts designed by creators, for users, to function within a particular setting ( Prior, 2003 ). Documents exist not as standalone objects of study but must be understood in the social web of meaning within which they are produced and consumed. For example, some analysts distinguish between public documents (produced in the context of public sector activities), private documents (from business and civil society) and personal documents (created by or for individuals, and generally not meant for public consumption) ( Mogalakwe, 2009 ). Documents can be used in a number of ways throughout the research process ( Bowen, 2009 ). In the planning or study design phase, they can be used to gather background information and help refine the research question. Documents can also be used to spark ideas for disseminating research once it is complete, by observing the ways those who will use the research speak to and communicate ideas with one another.
Documents can also be used during data collection and analysis to help answer research questions. Recent health policy research shows that this can be done in at least four ways. Frequently, policy documents are reviewed to describe the content or categorize the approaches to specific health problems in existing policies, as in reviews of the composition of drowning prevention resources in the United States or policy responses to foetal alcohol spectrum disorder in South Africa ( Katchmarchi et al. , 2018 ; Adebiyi et al. , 2019 ). In other cases, non-policy documents are used to examine the implementation of health policies in real-world settings, as in a review of web sources and newspapers analysing the functioning of community health councils in New Zealand ( Gurung et al. , 2020 ). Perhaps less frequently, document analysis is used to analyse policy processes, as in an assessment of multi-sectoral planning process for nutrition in Burkina Faso ( Ouedraogo et al. , 2020 ). Finally, and most broadly, document analysis can be used to inform new policies, as in one study that assessed cigarette sticks as communication and branding ‘documents,’ to suggest avenues for further regulation and tobacco control activities ( Smith et al. , 2017 ).
This practice paper provides an overarching method for conducting document analysis, which can be adapted to a multitude of research questions and topics. Document analysis is used in most or all policy studies; the aim of this article is to provide a systematized method that will enhance procedural rigour. We provide an overview of document analysis, drawing on guidance from disciplines adjacent to public health, introduce the ‘READ’ approach to document analysis and provide two short case studies demonstrating how document analysis can be applied.
Document analysis is a systematic procedure for reviewing or evaluating documents, which can be used to provide context, generate questions, supplement other types of research data, track change over time and corroborate other sources ( Bowen, 2009 ). In one commonly cited approach in social research, Bowen recommends first skimming the documents to get an overview, then reading to identify relevant categories of analysis for the overall set of documents and finally interpreting the body of documents ( Bowen, 2009 ). Document analysis can include both quantitative and qualitative components: the approach presented here can be used with either set of methods, but we emphasize qualitative ones, which are more adapted to the socially constructed meaning-making inherent to collaborative exercises such as policymaking.
The study of documents as a research method is common to a number of social science disciplines—yet in many of these fields, including sociology ( Mogalakwe, 2009 ), anthropology ( Prior, 2003 ) and political science ( Wesley, 2010 ), document-based research is described as ill-considered and underutilized. Unsurprisingly, textual analysis is perhaps most developed in fields such as media studies, cultural studies and literary theory, all disciplines that recognize documents as ‘social facts’ that are created, consumed, shared and utilized in socially organized ways ( Atkinson and Coffey, 1997 ). Documents exist within social ‘fields of action,’ a term used to designate the environments within which individuals and groups interact. Documents are therefore not mere records of social life, but integral parts of it—and indeed can become agents in their own right ( Prior, 2003 ). Powerful entities also manipulate the nature and content of knowledge; therefore, gaps in available information must be understood as reflecting and potentially reinforcing societal power relations ( Bryman and Burgess, 1994 ).
Document analysis, like any research method, can be subject to concerns regarding validity, reliability, authenticity, motivated authorship, lack of representativity and so on. However, these can be mitigated or avoided using standard techniques to enhance qualitative rigour, such as triangulation (within documents and across methods and theoretical perspectives), ensuring adequate sample size or ‘engagement’ with the documents, member checking, peer debriefing and so on ( Maxwell, 2005 ).
Document analysis can be used as a standalone method, e.g. to analyse the contents of specific types of policy as they evolve over time and differ across geographies, but document analysis can also be powerfully combined with other types of methods to cross-validate (i.e. triangulate) and deepen the value of concurrent methods. As one guide to public policy research puts it, ‘almost all likely sources of information, data, and ideas fall into two general types: documents and people’ ( Bardach and Patashnik, 2015 ). Thus, researchers can ask interviewees to address questions that arise from policy documents and point the way to useful new documents. Bardach and Patashnik suggest alternating between documents and interviews as sources as information, as one tends to lead to the other, such as by scanning interviewees’ bookshelves and papers for titles and author names ( Bardach and Patashnik, 2015 ). Depending on your research questions, document analysis can be used in combination with different types of interviews ( Berner-Rodoreda et al. , 2018 ), observation ( Harvey, 2018 ), and quantitative analyses, among other common methods in policy research.
The READ approach to document analysis is a systematic procedure for collecting documents and gaining information from them in the context of health policy studies at any level (global, national, local, etc.). The steps consist of: (1) ready your materials, (2) extract data, (3) analyse data and (4) distil your findings. We describe each of these steps in turn.
At the outset, researchers must set parameters in terms of the nature and number (approximately) of documents they plan to analyse, based on the research question. How much time will you allocate to the document analysis, and what is the scope of your research question? Depending on the answers to these questions, criteria should be established around (1) the topic (a particular policy, programme, or health issue, narrowly defined according to the research question); (2) dates of inclusion (whether taking the long view of several decades, or zooming in on a specific event or period in time); and (3) an indicative list of places to search for documents (possibilities include databases such as Ministry archives; LexisNexis or other databases; online searches; and particularly interview subjects). For difficult-to-obtain working documents or otherwise non-public items, bringing a flash drive to interviews is one of the best ways to gain access to valuable documents.
For research focusing on a single policy or programme, you may review only a handful of documents. However, if you are looking at multiple policies, health issues, or contexts, or reviewing shorter documents (such as newspaper articles), you may look at hundreds, or even thousands of documents. When considering the number of documents you will analyse, you should make notes on the type of information you plan to extract from documents—i.e. what it is you hope to learn, and how this will help answer your research question(s). The initial criteria—and the data you seek to extract from documents—will likely evolve over the course of the research, as it becomes clear whether they will yield too few documents and information (a rare outcome), far too many documents and too much information (a much more common outcome) or documents that fail to address the research question; however, it is important to have a starting point to guide the search. If you find that the documents you need are unavailable, you may need to reassess your research questions or consider other methods of inquiry. If you have too many documents, you can either analyse a subset of these ( Panel 1 ) or adopt more stringent inclusion criteria.
Exploring the framing of diseases in Pakistani media
Health policies must account for how societies perceive and understand a given disease’s origins and causes, and media sources play an important role in framing health issues ( ; ). Document analysis was employed to understand the frames used in print media (newspapers) in Pakistan when discussing Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and viral hepatitis, two diseases that are spread using similar modes of transmission but have varying levels of stigma in the country. Alongside document analysis, key informant interviews were used for triangulation and to flesh out what stigma for HIV meant in the country. A sample of newspaper articles was drawn from the electronic database LexisNexis (January 2006-September 2016) based on readership, electronic availability in LexisNexis and geographic diversity, to capture cultural differences across provinces over time ( ). Broad search terms were used for HIV and viral hepatitis, resulting in 3415 articles for hepatitis and1580 articles for HIV. A random sample comprising 10% of the total HIV articles ( = 156) and 5% of the total hepatitis articles ( = 176) was selected and coded using a fixed coding guide. The coding guide was developed using an inductive approach ( ; ), which involved reading a sample of articles line by line to identify media frames for HIV and viral hepatitis ( ; , 2012). Two rounds of pre-testing were carried out before the final sample of articles was coded. However, the use of LexisNexis as the primary data source excluded newspapers published in the local language (opening up the possibility of omitting some media frames). Therefore, interviews were important for triangulation of findings. Data from document analysis were collated in an Excel sheet and analysed in STATA 14. The findings of the document analysis highlighted that while both diseases were transmitted predominantly through injecting drug use in the country, hepatitis was only discussed using frames such as ‘medical’ (discussing transmission, prevention, and treatment methods), ‘resources’ (resources available to fight the disease), ‘magnitude’ (gives the scope of the problem or disease prevalence) and ‘need for awareness’–there was no ‘stigma and discrimination’ frame attached to the disease [Figure, HIV and viral hepatitis articles by main frames (%)]. In contrast, the ‘stigma and discrimination’ frame and the ‘social causes of disease’ frame (discussing non-medical causes for the spread of disease) were used exclusively in articles on HIV, notably including suggestions that acquiring the disease was linked to socially immoral and un-Islamic behaviour. Key informant interviews helped to probe further the traits associated with someone who had HIV. Taken together, document analysis and key informant interviews helped build a richer narrative of HIV stigma in the country. Given the difference in how these diseases were understood, these findings suggested that there was a need for explicit policy to reframe HIV as a disease. Countries such as Iran, Indonesia and Malaysia have successfully garnered government and policy attention to HIV and reduced stigma by reframing it as a disease spread through injecting drug use ( ). |
In Table 1 , we present a non-exhaustive list of the types of documents that can be included in document analyses of health policy issues. In most cases, this will mean written sources (policies, reports, articles). The types of documents to be analysed will vary by study and according to the research question, although in many cases, it will be useful to consult a mix of formal documents (such as official policies, laws or strategies), ‘gray literature’ (organizational materials such as reports, evaluations and white papers produced outside formal publication channels) and, whenever possible, informal or working documents (such as meeting notes, PowerPoint presentations and memoranda). These latter in particular can provide rich veins of insight into how policy actors are thinking through the issues under study, particularly for the lucky researcher who obtains working documents with ‘Track Changes.’ How you prioritize documents will depend on your research question: you may prioritize official policy documents if you are studying policy content, or you may prioritize informal documents if you are studying policy process.
Types of documents that can be consulted in studies of health policy
Category | Examples |
---|---|
Official documents | |
Implementation documents | |
Legal documents | |
Working documents | |
Scholarly work | |
Media and communications | |
Other |
During this initial preparatory phase, we also recommend devising a file-naming system for your documents (e.g. Author.Date.Topic.Institution.PDF), so that documents can be easily retrieved throughout the research process. After extracting data and processing your documents the first time around, you will likely have additional ‘questions’ to ask your documents and need to consult them again. For this reason, it is important to clearly name source files and link filenames to the data that you are extracting (see sample naming conventions in the Supplementary Materials ).
Data can be extracted in a number of ways, and the method you select for doing so will depend on your research question and the nature of your documents. One simple way is to use an Excel spreadsheet where each row is a document and each column is a category of information you are seeking to extract, from more basic data such as the document title, author and date, to theoretical or conceptual categories deriving from your research question, operating theory or analytical framework (Panel 2). Documents can also be imported into thematic coding software such as Atlas.ti or NVivo, and data extracted that way. Alternatively, if the research question focuses on process, documents can be used to compile a timeline of events, to trace processes across time. Ask yourself, how can I organize these data in the most coherent manner? What are my priority categories? We have included two different examples of data extraction tools in the Supplementary Materials to this article to spark ideas.
Case study Documents tell part of the story in Niger
In a multi-country policy analysis of integrated Community Case Management of childhood illness (iCCM), Niger was among the few countries that scaled up the policy at national level ( ). Alongside key stakeholder interviews and non-participant observation, document analysis was used to reconstruct the policy process leading to this outcome. In total, 103 documents were obtained from policy actors in Niger, researchers working on similar topics, or collected on the Internet ( ). Documents included official policies and strategies, field reports, legal regulations, program evaluations, funding proposals, newsletters and newspaper articles, among other sources. Document acquisition was greatly facilitated by asking for documents during stakeholder interviews, although some documents were not available due to a fire that destroyed World Health Organization (WHO) servers in the years preceding the study. Data from the documents was extracted into a Microsoft Excel file, recording information about specific aspects of child health policy and programs, framing of issues, use of research evidence, and mention of international recommendations, among other topics. Documents were also used to compile a timeline of events in the policy process. Policy processes were elucidated by creating a timeline of events, which documented how specific decrees, workshops, meetings, and other events occurred over time. The timeline was overlaid with measures of implementation (number of health posts built, number of health workers trained) to understand how decision-making processes propelled real-world outcomes, and served as proxies for financial data that were rarely included in policy documents ( ). Additionally, document analysis revealed a partial account of what was driving these events. Many documents showed a concern for reaching the Millennium Development Goal on child mortality (Figure, Representations of progress toward Millennium Development Goal 4 in Nigerien policy documents). Graphs mapping country progress toward Millennium Development Goal (MDG)-4 appeared in nearly all documentation on iCCM, and progress was regularly reported on by the Nigerien National Institute of Statistics, suggesting that these were a significant motivating factor in policy and resource allocation decisions. Yet older historical documents showed a long-standing recognition of the problem of children's access to life-saving healthcare (well before the MDGs), with policy remedies going back to least 1965 in the form of rural first-aid workers ( ). Triangulation with interviews and observation also showed that national policymakers’ practical knowledge and ethical imperative to save children's lives was at least as important as the MDGs in motivating policy action ( ). Taken together, the document and non-document data showed that, as in other contexts, the MDGs were useful mainly to direct international fundraising and satisfy donor norms in expectation of funding increases ( ). |
Document analyses are first and foremost exercises in close reading: documents should be read thoroughly, from start to finish, including annexes, which may seem tedious but which sometimes produce golden nuggets of information. Read for overall meaning as you extract specific data related to your research question. As you go along, you will begin to have ideas or build working theories about what you are learning and observing in the data. We suggest capturing these emerging theories in extended notes or ‘memos,’ as used in Grounded Theory methodology ( Charmaz, 2006 ); these can be useful analytical units in themselves and can also provide a basis for later report and article writing.
As you read more documents, you may find that your data extraction tool needs to be modified to capture all the relevant information (or to avoid wasting time capturing irrelevant information). This may require you to go back and seek information in documents you have already read and processed, which will be greatly facilitated by a coherent file-naming system. It is also useful to keep notes on other documents that are mentioned that should be tracked down (sometimes you can write the author for help). As a general rule, we suggest being parsimonious when selecting initial categories to extract from data. Simply reading the documents takes significant time in and of itself—make sure you think about how, exactly, the specific data you are extracting will be used and how it goes towards answering your research questions.
As in all types of qualitative research, data collection and analysis are iterative and characterized by emergent design, meaning that developing findings continually inform whether and how to obtain and interpret data ( Creswell, 2013 ). In practice, this means that during the data extraction phase, the researcher is already analysing data and forming initial theories—as well as potentially modifying document selection criteria. However, only when data extraction is complete can one see the full picture. For example, are there any documents that you would have expected to find, but did not? Why do you think they might be missing? Are there temporal trends (i.e. similarities, differences or evolutions that stand out when documents are ordered chronologically)? What else do you notice? We provide a list of overarching questions you should think about when viewing your body of document as a whole ( Table 2 ).
Questions to ask your overall body of documents
: |
HIV and viral hepatitis articles by main frames (%). Note: The percentage of articles is calculated by dividing the number of articles appearing in each frame for viral hepatitis and HIV by the respectivenumber of sampled articles for each disease (N = 137 for HIV; N = 117 for hepatitis). Time frame: 1 January 2006 to 30 September 2016
Representations of progress toward Millennium Development Goal 4 in Nigerien policy documents. Sources: clockwise from upper left: ( WHO 2006 ); ( Institut National de la Statistique 2010 ); ( Ministè re de la Santé Publique 2010 ); ( Unicef 2010 )
In addition to the meaning-making processes you are already engaged in during the data extraction process, in most cases, it will be useful to apply specific analysis methodologies to the overall corpus of your documents, such as policy analysis ( Buse et al. , 2005 ). An array of analysis methodologies can be used, both quantitative and qualitative, including case study methodology, thematic content analysis, discourse analysis, framework analysis and process tracing, which may require differing levels of familiarity and skills to apply (we highlight a few of these in the case studies below). Analysis can also be structured according to theoretical approaches. When it comes to analysing policies, process tracing can be particularly useful to combine multiple sources of information, establish a chronicle of events and reveal political and social processes, so as to create a narrative of the policy cycle ( Yin, 1994 ; Shiffman et al. , 2004 ). Practically, you will also want to take a holistic view of the documents’ ‘answers’ to the questions or analysis categories you applied during the data extraction phase. Overall, what did the documents ‘say’ about these thematic categories? What variation did you find within and between documents, and along which axes? Answers to these questions are best recorded by developing notes or memos, which again will come in handy as you write up your results.
As with all qualitative research, you will want to consider your own positionality towards the documents (and their sources and authors); it may be helpful to keep a ‘reflexivity’ memo documenting how your personal characteristics or pre-standing views might influence your analysis ( Watt, 2007 ).
You will know when you have completed your document review when one of the three things happens: (1) completeness (you feel satisfied you have obtained every document fitting your criteria—this is rare), (2) out of time (this means you should have used more specific criteria), and (3) saturation (you fully or sufficiently understand the phenomenon you are studying). In all cases, you should strive to make the third situation the reason for ending your document review, though this will not always mean you will have read and analysed every document fitting your criteria—just enough documents to feel confident you have found good answers to your research questions.
Now it is time to refine your findings. During the extraction phase, you did the equivalent of walking along the beach, noticing the beautiful shells, driftwood and sea glass, and picking them up along the way. During the analysis phase, you started sorting these items into different buckets (your analysis categories) and building increasingly detailed collections. Now you have returned home from the beach, and it is time to clean your objects, rinse them of sand and preserve only the best specimens for presentation. To do this, you can return to your memos, refine them, illustrate them with graphics and quotes and fill in any incomplete areas. It can also be illuminating to look across different strands of work: e.g. how did the content, style, authorship, or tone of arguments evolve over time? Can you illustrate which words, concepts or phrases were used by authors or author groups?
Results will often first be grouped by theoretical or analytic category, or presented as a policy narrative, interweaving strands from other methods you may have used (interviews, observation, etc.). It can also be helpful to create conceptual charts and graphs, especially as this corresponds to your analytical framework (Panels 1 and 2). If you have been keeping a timeline of events, you can seek out any missing information from other sources. Finally, ask yourself how the validity of your findings checks against what you have learned using other methods. The final products of the distillation process will vary by research study, but they will invariably allow you to state your findings relative to your research questions and to draw policy-relevant conclusions.
Document analysis is an essential component of health policy research—it is also relatively convenient and can be low cost. Using an organized system of analysis enhances the document analysis’s procedural rigour, allows for a fuller understanding of policy process and content and enhances the effectiveness of other methods such as interviews and non-participant observation. We propose the READ approach as a systematic method for interrogating documents and extracting study-relevant data that is flexible enough to accommodate many types of research questions. We hope that this article encourages discussion about how to make best use of data from documents when researching health policy questions.
Supplementary data are available at Health Policy and Planning online.
Czaa064_supplementary_data, acknowledgements.
The data extraction tool in the Supplementary Materials for the iCCM case study (Panel 2) was conceived of by the research team for the multi-country study ‘Policy Analysis of Community Case Management for Childhood and Newborn Illnesses’. The authors thank Sara Bennett and Daniela Rodriguez for granting permission to publish this tool. S.M. was supported by The Olympia-Morata-Programme of Heidelberg University. The funders had no role in the decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The content is the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of any funder.
Conflict of interest statement . None declared.
Ethical approval. No ethical approval was required for this study.
Published by
Follow this blog
by Aimee Grant 22nd March 2022
Whenever I say that I ‘do documentary analysis’ or ‘research with documents’ I tend to get a confused look. I think this is because unlike ‘doing interviews’, it’s not clear what documentary analysis means! So, let me start out by telling you a little bit about documentary analysis, and then I’ll move on to my experience of doing documentary analysis and explain why I think it’s a fantastic leveller for students and researchers with a wide variety of needs.
At its most basic, documentary analysis is research which involves documents as the data. Going back to the ‘doing interviews’ analogy, instead of talking to a person to find out about their views or experiences, we would find and then analyse things that people have written. This also allows us to understand something about their views and experiences of the thing they’re writing about. The type of data that are used for documentary analysis aren’t only things that are in hard copy; these days we also look at the things people are creating online. We also don’t restrict ourselves to words but also include images in our analysis, because sometimes images are used to imply things that are so offensive they could not be ‘said out loud’ ( Stuart Hall talks about this ). Examples of documents include images like adverts on the side of buses (and anywhere else), packaging of products we use and buy, passports, meeting notes, letters, diaries and anything else with words or images on it.
Moving on to analysis and there are dozens and dozens of qualitative analysis techniques. What may be surprising to know is that there is not a single analysis technique called ‘documentary analysis’. This is something that is definitely not as clear as it could be. Instead, returning to our comparison with interviews, any analysis technique can be used to consider the data using both methods. This includes things like thematic analysis, discourse analysis and content analysis. Detailed examples of documentary analysis using each of these analysis methods can be found in my first book, Doing Excellent Social Research with Documents .
My experiences of using the method stem from my research using documents as data as part of my undergraduate dissertation (looking at how UK Housing Benefit procedures contribute to homelessness). As part of my masters (examining an example of a policy failure) and PhD (on lived experiences of welfare reform for disabled people and staff ), I used this method again, alongside other qualitative methods. To be honest, at that time I used the documents as ‘second-class’ data, placing more emphasis on the interview and observational data that I undertook. I had greater knowledge of how to handle this data, which I supplemented and triangulated with the available documents. Following my PhD, however, I moved out of academia. As a disabled academic awaiting multiple surgeries, I did not have the luxury of taking a job that required me to move out of my local NHS trust area, which severely limited my academic job opportunities.
That said, I definitely didn’t feel that I was ‘done’ with being an academic, and so I started to look for ways that I could continue my research. One major issue was that without being part of a university, I did not have access to an ethics committee. This led me back to documents – many documentary analysis studies don’t require ethical approval. The exception to this in general seems to be where you would need to log in to a website to access the content you wish to analyse. That said, as researchers, we need to be careful to consider the ethical implications of using data when ethical review isn’t required (see chapter 4 of my new book, Doing your Research Project with Documents ).
Another barrier was that I worked full time 9-5 in a charity, and then for the NHS. Using documents as research data allows you to do the research whenever or wherever you want to, unlike for example, needing to interview somebody. I remember sitting on a Megabus on the way to visit friends in London, for example, while coding newspaper articles relating to treatment targets (like the UK four-hour waiting time) in A&E departments . Likewise, when my day job looked like it wasn’t going to produce any journal articles for a while, I was able to do an analysis of comments about breastfeeding in public on the Mail Online website (the online version of the Daily Mail ) and also compare it to content relating to the same incident on Twitter.
Documentary analysis also allowed me to apply for small pots of funding, and to know that there would be a piece of research which could be published from it; for example this research involved an analysis of Twitter content relating to waterpipe smoking , with Dr Hannah O’Mahoney working for me for two months. Had we needed to interview people, or conduct observations, those two months would likely have been taken up with data collection alone, which was an issue that Dr Dawn Mannay and I found with interview-based projects that used visual methods; the data was brilliant, but it was challenging to do these pieces of work with tiny pots of seed funding.
To conclude, documentary analysis is a flexible method which can be used with and without theory and using a wide range of analysis approaches. It has many advantages for researchers and students alike who are disabled, working alongside their studies or research careers, or who have caring responsibilities. I would be surprised if there were a single topic in the world that could not be at least partially understood through critically reading things that have been written about it. If you are carrying out your first research project using documents, or feel like you are not confident with the methodology, you may wish to read my new book, published by Policy Press, Doing your Research Project with Documents .
Aimee Grant is a qualitative researcher with a long-standing interest in documentary analysis. She is based at Swansea University’s Centre for Lactation, Infant Feeding and Translational Research.
Find out more about impact, influence and engagement at Policy Press here . Policy Press newsletter subscribers receive a 25% discount – sign up here . The views and opinions expressed on this blog site are solely those of the original blog post authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the Policy Press and/or any/ all contributors to this site.
Image Credit: Chiara F on Unsplash
Why we need to think critically about social policy, why does public sexual harassment matter, how the far-right impacted activism in the brazilian amazon, the risks of care: justice, family carers and the pandemic, a time for radical empathy.
Course catalog, documentary research methods, schools of public engagement: media.
Credits : 3
This course is a non-production course in documentary research methodology. With a focus on the American documentary tradition, this course introduces the theoretical and practical foundations necessary for conducting research in the context of designing and developing documentary film content. We will examine award-winning documentary films as models, and will look at their process, their choices, and the emotional impact of these decisions in an attempt to understand the various stages of thought and of research that went in to creating the final film as a piece of art. The readings represent a diversity of approaches to qualitative research, and raise questions about what constitutes "good" research; and as such, what adds to our knowledge of the social world. We will ask such questions as: What is a good documentary subject? Why should we do documentary research, and how does doing it implicate us in a complex web of issues concerning the politics of representation and the social construction of meaning? Methodologies examined include print, photo and archival research; observation and direct cinema; interviews and oral histories; and participant observation; among others. Students will create a literature and film review on their own documentary subject, and will design, research, and write up their own documentary proposal and treatment.
College : Schools of Public Engagement (NS)
Department : Media (MED)
Campus : New York City (GV)
Course Format : Seminar (R)
Modality : Online - Synchronous
Max Enrollment : 18
Add/Drop Deadline : September 9, 2024 (Monday)
Online Withdrawal Deadline : November 17, 2024 (Sunday)
Seats Available : Yes
Status : Open *
* Status information is updated every few minutes. The status of this course may have changed since the last update. Open seats may have restrictions that will prevent some students from registering. Updated: 11:44pm EDT 6/10/2024
Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser .
Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.
2009, Eastern Africa Social Science Research Review
DR. JASHIM UDDIN AHMED
Frank Ezuruike
Wivian Weller
I International Conference on Media Ethics – Proceedings (pp. 223-234)
Willemien Sanders
Documentary scholars have presupposed a certain documentary practice, and have ethically evaluated this practice, with a focus on the need for protection for a vulnerable and ignorant participant. But times have changed. By researching the experience of ethical challenges by both documentary filmmakers and participants, through both a quantitative and a qualitative project, a practice surfaces in which the participant is committed to and involved in the project; conflict between filmmaker and participant is recurrent, but non-decisive, as communication, trust, and commitment act as a safety-net. Hence, questions about documentary ethics need to address this contemporary practice, rather than a past one.
Mass Communication and Society
Matthew C . Nisbet
Recent films such as Fahrenheit 9/11, Supersize Me, An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc., and Sicko have generated attention to how documentaries can shape debates over social issues and policy questions. Documentaries are no longer conventionally perceived as a passive experience intended solely for informal learning or entertainment. Instead, with ever increasing frequency, these films are considered part of a larger effort to spark debate, mold public opinion, shape policy, and build activist networks. In addition to these new forms ...
Steph M. Anderson , Carolina Muñoz Proto
In recent years, psychologists have begun to use video more frequently in qualitative research, in particular, within research on social justice. The non-confidential nature inherent in video, however, raises new ethical challenges for the field of psychology to address. Building upon a growing literature on video-based research, in this article, we use an illustrative case study to examine how researchers' sense of ethical responsibility can find guidance from, clash against, or fill gaps left by extant federal and disciplinary ethical requirements. We focus specifically on issues of confidentiality and representation, highlighting the challenges and possibilities that video creates in relation to participants' power, dignity, and participation and arguing that psychologists must systematically engage questions about ethical responsibilities throughout the design and implementation phases of a research project. In doing so, psychologists, their community partners, and students will be better able to articulate and problematize their assumptions and intentions regarding video work.
Palgrave Macmillan
Nasir Uddin
The methodology of social research has been transformed along with the metamorphosis of the socioeconomic and political rhetoric and the reality across the globe. Because of its various experience and experiments depending on the subjects, contexts and regions, social research methodology itself has become an issue of research in the twenty-first century. The fieldwork challenges vary from discipline to discipline and from region to region because every discipline in social sciences, despite having some identical broader frameworks, has its distinctive tone of interpretation and every region has its own social, political, historical and ecological settings. Social research involves the researcher's engagement, interpersonal attachment, and impersonal affection in dealing with persons; the object of study (See, Uddin, 2011). Since social research and its methodologies tend to change and evolve from time to time, new and newer fieldwork experiences are needed to reformulate the model and module of social research methods and methodologies. Hence, a new form of methodology could be framed that reflects the researcher's personal, political, social, cultural and emotional holdings being developed and formed throughout the researcher's socialization and socio-cultural upbringing across time and space (See, Uddin, 2022). Consequently, social research is not simply a typical 'academic practice' that follows an innocent 'professional genre' and 'research rituals'; rather it heavily entangles with the researcher's lived experiences.
National Centre for Research Methods
Michael Mair
On the 21st and 22nd November at the University of Liverpool in London, NCRM held an innovation forum to explore the embryonic field of “investigative social research” and the methods that underpin it. A dynamic and frequently high impact contemporary field, investigative social research encompasses work by non-governmental organisation/civil society researchers, data and investigative journalists, open source investigators, lawyers and independent researchers alongside social scientists of all kinds, from anthropologists, criminologists, epidemiologists, geographers, historians and sociologists through to those involved in accounting, economics and financial studies as well as data science. This emerging global field is characterised by the breadth of output it produces: often fast-circulating studies, news stories, reports, trackers and apps which attract global public attention. Researchers in the field make heavy use of: “new data technologies and analytics and other means of intellectual cross pollination, exchanging ideas and sometimes working and writing together, side by side, across borders, and genres each of them with different perspectives, backgrounds, interests, professional expertise, not to mention internationally and culturally diverse geographic and economic circumstances” (Lewis 2018: 23). In this context, investigative researchers are developing approaches which, as Ruppert and Savage observe, “engage with new forms of data and analytic techniques, undertake rich empirical analysis as well as develop new resources for understanding [the world and what happens in it]” (Ruppert and Savage 2009: 17). In so doing, researchers are contributing to the development of distinctive new “ways of knowing” (ibid.). No longer the preserve of universities and academic disciplines, this opening up and reworking of “the methods and practices that researchers and analysts use to make sense of data” and do useful things with it (Arribas-Bel & Reades 2018: 5) is happening across disciplinary, sectoral and geographical boundaries (with collaborations spanning the globe and involving researchers from countries in the Global South as much as the North). Investigative social research, as the forum showed, is often data intensive, digitally enabled, highly collaborative and impactful and gives rise to its own distinctive “politics of method” (Savage & Burrows 2007, Gray 2019). The purpose of the forum was to explore the methods that enable researchers in this field to pursue topics of social, political and economic import. Whether it is the investigations into the Panama and Paradise Papers, the identification of the Salisbury Novichok poisoners, the documenting of NATO airstrikes as well as civilian deaths across the Middle East, the verification of political violence in Africa through crowd-sourced video and photographic imagery, the tracking and tracing of those infected by COVID-19 during the current pandemic or in quickly contextualising and framing emerging news stories by drawing on new datasets and analytical techniques, investigative social research engages with important aspects of our lives.
Michael Wayne
Much of the attraction of and debates and controversies around the documentary genre derives from it being a hybrid form, straddling both conflicting paradigms within the traditional social sciences on the one hand and the aesthetic dimensions of art and entertainment on the other. Mixed in with these cross-currents, the question of the political or ideological nature of documentary as research, its ‘critical’ or ‘uncritical’ nature vis-à-vis dominant institutions, power relations, commonsense frameworks of explanation, interpretation and embedded cultural assumptions, are never far away. This essay is about this trinity of terms as they pertain to the documentary: critical, creative, research. It asks what it means to discuss documentary as a mode of research, i.e. to what extent this audio-visual based genre overlaps with issues around knowledge production associated with the social sciences; what it means to discuss some documentary films as critical practices, i.e. to define what ‘critical’ might mean for the media generally in the present contemporary context of unleashed global capitalism and how it might best be related to documentary; and this essay asks what it means to discuss documentary as a ‘creative’ practice, i.e. one in which aesthetics plays a key role in its production and consumption. Finally this essay explores the relationships between the critical, creative/aesthetic and research aspects of documentary.
University News
Dr. Sandeep Jagdale
There is a shift of attention experienced by young social scholars who are continuously engaged in either studying or doing research. This continuous endeavor of exploring about social research made them to question their past notions of research, their own work it may be in the form of research done by them or their published research papers in academic journals. Moreover, it is a journey of every social scholar who considers research as a ‘dynamic perspective’ and not as an event. Social research is been much condemned by everyone though it is from pure science subject or social science subject or within social sciences based on quantitative or qualitative shift. The author has an opinion that objectivity of any research in any science can always be in doubt mostly because of human error widely known as conflict of interest. This reflexive article highlights the known concerns about do’s and don’ts of social research. It also tries to cover the most expressed constraints about social research and possible ways to overcome them.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.
Sociological Inquiry
Dorothy ßmith
BULLETIN OF THE „TRANSILVANIA” UNIVERSITY OF BRAŞOV – Series VII: Social Sciences and Law
Florentina Scârneci-Domnișoru
Amin Palangi
Andrew W Chesher
Service navigation.
Path Navigation
The development of the documentary method is closely associated with the Division of Qualitative Research on Human Development. This methodology was first put forward in the 1920s by Karl Mannheim and then taken up again in the 1960s through ethnomethodology, especially by Harold Garfinkel. In its current form, the documentary method first became fruitful for empirical research in the social sciences in 1983, and then especially in 1989, through the work of Ralf Bohnsack at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, originally in connection with the group discussion process.
With this as the basis, the documentary method was then further developed, starting in 1991, at the Division of Qualitative Research on Human Development at Freie Universität Berlin, especially in the context of larger research projects on youth and deviance. This method now applies in a broad field throughout the social sciences and education, even extending as far as information technology and medicine. Its applications range from research into childhood, youth, and gender and adult education to medical sociology, research on policy and organizational cultures, and research on rituals and media use analysis.
The methodical or methodological spectrum covers discussion analysis and the group discussion process, analysis of interviews, participatory observation, and evaluation research, and even includes image and video analysis.
The documentary method forms the methodological foundation for the research conducted at the Center for Qualitative Evaluation and Social Research ( CES) .
Home » ANOVA (Analysis of variance) – Formulas, Types, and Examples
Table of Contents
Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) is a statistical method used to test differences between two or more means. It is similar to the t-test, but the t-test is generally used for comparing two means, while ANOVA is used when you have more than two means to compare.
ANOVA is based on comparing the variance (or variation) between the data samples to the variation within each particular sample. If the between-group variance is high and the within-group variance is low, this provides evidence that the means of the groups are significantly different.
When discussing ANOVA, there are several key terms to understand:
Types of ANOVA are as follows:
This is the simplest type of ANOVA, which involves one independent variable . For example, comparing the effect of different types of diet (vegetarian, pescatarian, omnivore) on cholesterol level.
This involves two independent variables. This allows for testing the effect of each independent variable on the dependent variable , as well as testing if there’s an interaction effect between the independent variables on the dependent variable.
This is used when the same subjects are measured multiple times under different conditions, or at different points in time. This type of ANOVA is often used in longitudinal studies.
This combines features of both between-subjects (independent groups) and within-subjects (repeated measures) designs. In this model, one factor is a between-subjects variable and the other is a within-subjects variable.
This is used when there are two or more dependent variables. It tests whether changes in the independent variable(s) correspond to changes in the dependent variables.
This combines ANOVA and regression. ANCOVA tests whether certain factors have an effect on the outcome variable after removing the variance for which quantitative covariates (interval variables) account. This allows the comparison of one variable outcome between groups, while statistically controlling for the effect of other continuous variables that are not of primary interest.
This model is used when the groups can be clustered into categories. For example, if you were comparing students’ performance from different classrooms and different schools, “classroom” could be nested within “school.”
ANOVA Formulas are as follows:
Sum of Squares Total (SST)
This represents the total variability in the data. It is the sum of the squared differences between each observation and the overall mean.
Sum of Squares Within (SSW)
This represents the variability within each group or factor level. It is the sum of the squared differences between each observation and its group mean.
Sum of Squares Between (SSB)
This represents the variability between the groups. It is the sum of the squared differences between the group means and the grand mean, multiplied by the number of observations in each group.
Degrees of Freedom
The degrees of freedom are the number of values that have the freedom to vary when calculating a statistic.
For within groups (dfW):
For between groups (dfB):
For total (dfT):
Mean Squares
Mean squares are the sum of squares divided by the respective degrees of freedom.
Mean Squares Between (MSB):
Mean Squares Within (MSW):
F-Statistic
The F-statistic is used to test whether the variability between the groups is significantly greater than the variability within the groups.
If the F-statistic is significantly higher than what would be expected by chance, we reject the null hypothesis that all group means are equal.
Examples 1:
Suppose a psychologist wants to test the effect of three different types of exercise (yoga, aerobic exercise, and weight training) on stress reduction. The dependent variable is the stress level, which can be measured using a stress rating scale.
Here are hypothetical stress ratings for a group of participants after they followed each of the exercise regimes for a period:
The psychologist wants to determine if there is a statistically significant difference in stress levels between these different types of exercise.
To conduct the ANOVA:
1. State the hypotheses:
2. Calculate the ANOVA statistics:
3. Check the p-value associated with the calculated F-statistic.
4. Post-hoc tests
Examples 2:
Suppose an agricultural scientist wants to compare the yield of three varieties of wheat. The scientist randomly selects four fields for each variety and plants them. After harvest, the yield from each field is measured in bushels. Here are the hypothetical yields:
The scientist wants to know if the differences in yields are due to the different varieties or just random variation.
Here’s how to apply the one-way ANOVA to this situation:
Conducting an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) involves several steps. Here’s a general guideline on how to perform it:
ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) is used when you have three or more groups and you want to compare their means to see if they are significantly different from each other. It is a statistical method that is used in a variety of research scenarios. Here are some examples of when you might use ANOVA:
Here are the assumptions that must be met to use ANOVA:
The Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) is a powerful statistical technique that is used widely across various fields and industries. Here are some of its key applications:
Agriculture
ANOVA is commonly used in agricultural research to compare the effectiveness of different types of fertilizers, crop varieties, or farming methods. For example, an agricultural researcher could use ANOVA to determine if there are significant differences in the yields of several varieties of wheat under the same conditions.
Manufacturing and Quality Control
ANOVA is used to determine if different manufacturing processes or machines produce different levels of product quality. For instance, an engineer might use it to test whether there are differences in the strength of a product based on the machine that produced it.
Marketing Research
Marketers often use ANOVA to test the effectiveness of different advertising strategies. For example, a marketer could use ANOVA to determine whether different marketing messages have a significant impact on consumer purchase intentions.
Healthcare and Medicine
In medical research, ANOVA can be used to compare the effectiveness of different treatments or drugs. For example, a medical researcher could use ANOVA to test whether there are significant differences in recovery times for patients who receive different types of therapy.
ANOVA is used in educational research to compare the effectiveness of different teaching methods or educational interventions. For example, an educator could use it to test whether students perform significantly differently when taught with different teaching methods.
Psychology and Social Sciences
Psychologists and social scientists use ANOVA to compare group means on various psychological and social variables. For example, a psychologist could use it to determine if there are significant differences in stress levels among individuals in different occupations.
Biology and Environmental Sciences
Biologists and environmental scientists use ANOVA to compare different biological and environmental conditions. For example, an environmental scientist could use it to determine if there are significant differences in the levels of a pollutant in different bodies of water.
Here are some advantages of using ANOVA:
Comparing Multiple Groups: One of the key advantages of ANOVA is the ability to compare the means of three or more groups. This makes it more powerful and flexible than the t-test, which is limited to comparing only two groups.
Control of Type I Error: When comparing multiple groups, the chances of making a Type I error (false positive) increases. One of the strengths of ANOVA is that it controls the Type I error rate across all comparisons. This is in contrast to performing multiple pairwise t-tests which can inflate the Type I error rate.
Testing Interactions: In factorial ANOVA, you can test not only the main effect of each factor, but also the interaction effect between factors. This can provide valuable insights into how different factors or variables interact with each other.
Handling Continuous and Categorical Variables: ANOVA can handle both continuous and categorical variables . The dependent variable is continuous and the independent variables are categorical.
Robustness: ANOVA is considered robust to violations of normality assumption when group sizes are equal. This means that even if your data do not perfectly meet the normality assumption, you might still get valid results.
Provides Detailed Analysis: ANOVA provides a detailed breakdown of variances and interactions between variables which can be useful in understanding the underlying factors affecting the outcome.
Capability to Handle Complex Experimental Designs: Advanced types of ANOVA (like repeated measures ANOVA, MANOVA, etc.) can handle more complex experimental designs, including those where measurements are taken on the same subjects over time, or when you want to analyze multiple dependent variables at once.
Some limitations or disadvantages that are important to consider:
Assumptions: ANOVA relies on several assumptions including normality (the data follows a normal distribution), independence (the observations are independent of each other), and homogeneity of variances (the variances of the groups are roughly equal). If these assumptions are violated, the results of the ANOVA may not be valid.
Sensitivity to Outliers: ANOVA can be sensitive to outliers. A single extreme value in one group can affect the sum of squares and consequently influence the F-statistic and the overall result of the test.
Dichotomous Variables: ANOVA is not suitable for dichotomous variables (variables that can take only two values, like yes/no or male/female). It is used to compare the means of groups for a continuous dependent variable.
Lack of Specificity: Although ANOVA can tell you that there is a significant difference between groups, it doesn’t tell you which specific groups are significantly different from each other. You need to carry out further post-hoc tests (like Tukey’s HSD or Bonferroni) for these pairwise comparisons.
Complexity with Multiple Factors: When dealing with multiple factors and interactions in factorial ANOVA, interpretation can become complex. The presence of interaction effects can make main effects difficult to interpret.
Requires Larger Sample Sizes: To detect an effect of a certain size, ANOVA generally requires larger sample sizes than a t-test.
Equal Group Sizes: While not always a strict requirement, ANOVA is most powerful and its assumptions are most likely to be met when groups are of equal or similar sizes.
Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer
An official website of the United States government.
Here’s how you know
The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.
The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.
Workforce tools, strategies and technical assistance.
June 6, 2024
May 30, 2024
May 23, 2024
IMAGES
VIDEO
COMMENTS
Documentary Research. Definition: Documentary research is a type of research method that involves the systematic investigation and analysis of existing documents or records. These documents can be in the form of written, visual, or audio materials, such as books, articles, photographs, videos, and audio recordings.
The documentary. research method is used in investigating and cat egorizing physical sources, most commonly written. documents, whether in the private or public domain (Payne and Payne 2004). This ...
Documentary research is a valuable form of research methodology as it provides access to existing documents and materials for analysis and interpretation. There are many advantages of these methods, such as diverse sources of data, historical perspectives, and access to large volumes of data from analysis.
This book guides you through the documentary research process, from choosing the best research design, through data collection and analysis, to publishing and sharing research findings. Documentary Research by Gary McCulloch. Publication Date: 2004. Documentary sources have become increasingly neglected in education and the social sciences.
Documentary Analysis. Definition: Documentary analysis, also referred to as document analysis, is a systematic procedure for reviewing or evaluating documents.This method involves a detailed review of the documents to extract themes or patterns relevant to the research topic.. Documents used in this type of analysis can include a wide variety of materials such as text (words) and images that ...
Documentary research, serving as both a complement to and extension of biographical inquiry, takes on different meanings in the field of education. ... in part, by the method in which meaning is constructed and perceived by its originally intended audience. While these four criteria are fundamental, McCullough (2004) underscores a fifth ...
Overview. Documentary research is a critical aspect of research in the social sciences and beyond. Indeed, it might be said to be endemic, as all researchers use documents - whether they be academic articles, national policy statements, historical records, online materials or personal accounts - to some extent in their research.
Documentary research. Documentary research is the use of outside sources, documents, to support the viewpoint or argument of an academic work. The process of documentary research often involves some or all of conceptualising, using and assessing documents. The analysis of the documents in documentary research would be either quantitative or ...
This book guides you through the documentary research process, from choosing the best research design, through data collection and analysis, to publishing and sharing research findings. Using extensive case studies and examples, it situates documentary research within a current context and empowers you to use this method to meet new challenges ...
the use of documentary research as the main approach or as part (i.e. alongside other approaches or techniques) of a research project, and the purpose and usage of documents. ... Meanwhile, in the foreground, practices and fashions in research methodology have also evolved, with a growing interest in the visual and aural seeking to complement ...
Documentary research examples. Bellow, we can find a few real-life examples of documentary research applied to companies' daily events. 1. Social research studies. Although documentary research is not used extensively today, it is the go-to research method to conduct social research studies. For example, Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim used ...
Documentary research is, arguably, one of the most overlooked aspects—yet in many ways one of the most critical aspects—of social research. Thousands of books have been written on social research, but only a relative handful has focused on documentary research. This book, therefore, sets out to provide an introductory, comprehensive, single-volume and up-to-date guide to documentary research.
This involves methods of textual analysis and content analysis.A useful recent overview of documentary research can be found in Lindsay Prior's Using Documents in Social Research (2003). Scott's A Matter of Record covers the issues involved in handling a range of documents, while Ken Plummer's Documents of Life, 2 (2001) gives good coverage of ...
It is a matter of questioning the subject in all its dimensions, formulating it in a short sentence, selecting important concepts and looking for synonyms. This step allows you to set the issue, identify documentary needs and select the key concepts/words in order to question your sources. 1 - Define the topic.
Documentary Filmmaking as a Research Method Introduction Documentary films through their multi-sensory nature have found to be more impactful of portraying reality as well as a means for social persuasion (Nichols, 2010). In recent years, documentary films are increasingly being used in academia as well for disseminating knowledge.
Document analysis (also called document review) is one of the most commonly used methods in health policy research; it is nearly impossible to conduct policy research without it. Writing in early 20th century, Weber (2015) identified the importance of formal, written documents as a key characteristic of the bureaucracies by which modern ...
At its most basic, documentary analysis is research which involves documents as the data. Going back to the 'doing interviews' analogy, instead of talking to a person to find out about their views or experiences, we would find and then analyse things that people have written. This also allows us to understand something about their views and ...
Documentary analysis is a popular method in a wide range of social sciences, as well as the arts. In essence, it means taking a systematic approach to understanding and interpreting documents. It can be used as a research method in history, looking at archives of soldiers' diaries, for example. It can be used in politics, looking at patterns ...
RESEARCH REPORT The Use of Documentary Research Methods in Social Research Monageng Mogalakwe Department of Sociology University of Botswana Gaborone, Bostswana Introduction Social research is an activity that is undertaken to find an answer or explanation regarding a particular social phenomenon. It involves systematic collection of data about ...
This paper outlines the importance of qualitative methods in German Educational Science. Therefore it begins with a subject definition and description of basic principles of qualitative research, and outlines the historic lines of development of the qualitative approach in Germany starting from the 18th century.
This course is a non-production course in documentary research methodology. With a focus on the American documentary tradition, this course introduces the theoretical and practical foundations necessary for conducting research in the context of designing and developing documentary film content. We will examine award-winning documentary films as models, and will look at their process, their ...
In this paper we make a case for the use of the documentary research method and argue that the use of documentary research method in social research is a respected research method that should be utilized by social scientists with the full confidence that it is also a scientific method that requires rigorous adherence to research ethics. This ...
Documentary Method. The development of the documentary method is closely associated with the Division of Qualitative Research on Human Development. This methodology was first put forward in the 1920s by Karl Mannheim and then taken up again in the 1960s through ethnomethodology, especially by Harold Garfinkel.
ANOVA is commonly used in agricultural research to compare the effectiveness of different types of fertilizers, crop varieties, or farming methods. For example, an agricultural researcher could use ANOVA to determine if there are significant differences in the yields of several varieties of wheat under the same conditions.
Though documentary films aren't scripted like fictional narratives, you can create a broad outline or even draw up storyboards to help you think about the footage you need and the possible directions the story might take. "Sometimes I'll write a storyline to help me envision the story or to help my stakeholders understand the type of story that I'm going for," says Pence.
Learn about the Employment and Training Administration, a federal agency that provides job training and apprenticeship programs for workers and employers.