Doing Excellent Social Research with Documents Practical Examples and Guidance for Qualitative Researchers

Drawing on research projects which reflect real world situations, this volume will guide you through the research process in detail, enabling you to examine and understand the practices and value of a range of documentary analysis approaches.

In today’s society we increasingly create and consume written content and images. This includes a range of sources, from social media posts to records held within organisations, and everything in between, including news articles, blogs, shopping lists and official government documents. Critically reading these ‘documents’ can help us to understand a huge amount about society. Doing Excellent Social Research with Documents includes guidance on how to ‘read between the lines’, and provides an overview of six research projects which use documents as data.

Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.