Documentary Research

In Education, History and the Social Sciences

Gary Mcculloch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134483242
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Documentary sources have become increasingly neglected in education and the social sciences. This book seeks to emphasise their potential value and importance for an understanding of modern societies, while also recognising their limitations, and explores their relationship with other research strategies.
This up-to-date examination of how to research and use documents analyzes texts from the past and present, considering sources ranging from personal archives to online documents and including books, reports, official documents, works of fiction and printed media.
This comprehensive analysis of the use of documents in research includes sections covering:
* analysing documents
* legal frameworks and ethical issues
* records and archives
* printed media and literature
* diaries, letters and autobiographies.

1
Introduction: Reading between the Lines

The aim of this book is to discuss the role of documents of different kinds in the study of education, history and the social sciences. I hope to explore their established uses and limitations, and also to examine some of the new possibilities that are opening up in documentary-based studies of education and society. Documents are literally all around us, they are inescapable, they are an integral part of our daily lives and our public concerns. In our personal, private dealings, documents are basic and indispensable requirements. As Plummer notes, the world is crammed full of human, personal documents: ‘People keep diaries, send letters, make quilts, take photos, dash off memos, compose auto/biographies, construct web sites, scrawl graffiti, publish their memoirs, write letters, compose CVs, leave suicide notes, film video diaries, inscribe memorials on tombstones, shoot films, paint pictures, make tapes and try to record their personal dreams’ (Plummer 2001, p. 17).

At a public level, too, our identities are defined by the documents that are kept about us—documents such as birth certificates, examination results, driving licences, bank statements, newspaper stories, committee minutes, obituaries and wills. A key distinction can be made between private documents, on the one hand, and public records, on the other (see for example Hodder 1998). In this book I am considering both private documents and public records, in this sense, as ‘documents’ on which to base documentary studies. Constantly struck as I am by the ubiquity and convenience of the document‚ I wish therefore to proselytise, to evoke something of the potential power of documentary studies in education, history and the social sciences. To understand documents is to read between the lines of our material world. We need to comprehend the words themselves to follow the plot, the basic storyline. But we need to get between the lines, to analyse their meaning and their deeper purpose, to develop a study that is based on documents.

There are several further aspects of the present work that I need to explain before proceeding. First, it is mainly about written documents. Within this category I include such items as policy reports, committee papers, public treatises, works of fiction, diaries, autobiographies, newspapers, magazines and letters. Until very recently such artefacts were generally written on paper, whether by hand or mechanically. Over the past decade this has changed dramatically with the development of the World Wide Web. So it is vitally important now to take due account of electronic documents, including electronic mail and the data stored and communicated through the Internet. This major innovation has already helped to transform the nature of documentary studies and to extend its potential, and this process is likely to continue and to increase in its significance. On the other hand it is also important to be aware of underlying historical continuities. The invention of the printing press with a movable print type, credited to Johann Gutenberg of Mainz in the mid fifteenth century, had massive implications for the development of what has been described as a ‘print culture’ (Briggs and Burke 2002; Chartier 1987). According to Chartier (1987, p. 1)‚

After Gutenberg, all culture in movable societies can be held to be a culture of the printed word, since what movable type and the printing press produced was not reserved (as in China and Korea) for the administrative use of the ruler but penetrated the entire web of social relations, bore thoughts and brought pleasures and lodged in people’s deepest self as well as claiming its place in the public scene.

Nevertheless, a hierarchy of genres and forms of documents was maintained that owed much to the period before the Gutenberg revolution‚

between the great folio volume, the ‘shelf-book’ of the universities and of serious study, which had to be propped up to be read, the humanist book, more manageable in its mid-sized format, which served for classical texts and new works of literature, and the portable book, the pocket book or the bedside book of many uses, religious and secular, and of a wider and less selective readership.

(Chartier 1988, p. 2)

By the same token, the electronic communications revolution of our own time, while transformative in many respects, may well retain and incorporate key elements of the print culture that has developed and spread over the past five hundred years.

Further to this, the present book is concerned mainly with documents that have been produced without any direct involvement on the part of the researcher, produced for other purposes and often with different priorities from those of the researcher. There is another type of documents that is deliberately produced by researchers as data for their research. This latter type is actively solicited by the researcher, and involves an interaction between the researcher and the producer of the document. As we will see, historically there have been a number of leading documentary researchers who have developed this kind of approach. It is a basic part of life history research, for instance, in which the researcher engages with the respondent to develop their life history, perhaps through interview-conversations, or group work, or keeping a journal, diary or other personal writings (see Goodson and Sikes 2001, especially chapter 2). More generally, transcripts of interviews or completed questionnaires might be included as documents of this type, documents prepared or facilitated by the researcher. As the ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel pointed out in the 1960s, documentary method is involved ‘on the many occasions of survey research when the researcher, in reviewing his interview notes or in editing the answers to a questionnaire, has to decide “what the respondent had in mind”’ (Garfinkel 1967, p. 95). More recently‚ David Silverman has suggested that the act of transcribing an interview turns it into a written text, and so makes a distinction between this kind of data and material recorded without the intervention of a researcher (Silverman 2001, p. 119; see also Silverman 2000, p. 40). Electronic technology has great potential for promoting the use of solicited documents, because of the rapid interchange that it makes possible, for interviewing through the medium of electronic mail for example, or the use of text messages and other convenient devices. A satisfactory treatment of the issues that arise from such research could be the subject of a separate work.

Equally‚ I am not principally concerned in this book with visual sources, such as paintings and film, although I take the point that, as Fairclough (1995) puts it, texts in contemporary society are increasingly ‘multi-semiotic’. That is, even printed texts whose primary form is language increasingly combine this with other forms such as photographs and diagrams. According to Fairclough‚ ‘We can continue regarding the text as a primarily linguistic cultural artefact, but develop ways of analysing other semiotic forms which are co-present with language, and especially how different semiotic forms interact in the multisemiotic text’ (Fairclough 1995, p. 4). I am happy to attempt this where it seems appropriate, but will avoid going too far into this territory. At the same time‚ I also intend not to discuss remains, as distinct from records, such as buildings, furniture, dinosaur bones and Roman coins. Again, this kind of artefact would demand detailed attention deserving of a separate treatise.

In more positive vein, there are a number of issues about the intended coverage of this book that also deserve preliminary explanation. It seeks to draw on international literature and to engage with issues that are recognisable, even if not precisely the same, in different countries around the world. In doing so, my examples will be mainly British but also include some from the English-speaking world, or, even more to the point, that part of the world that reads and writes English. Some aspects of documentary studies I would conceive as global in scale, while others are naturally and irresistibly localised. For example, there are general issues about types of documents such as letters and newspapers, and about collections of documents in libraries. On the other hand, documents need also to be interpreted in the light of specific factors involved in their production and context, such as personal, social, political and historical relationships.

In framing the present work‚ I have been conscious of the different traditions operating in relation to documentary studies in history and in the social sciences. For historians, documents have provided the staple source material and are basic to their work. Yet historians have not on the whole been active in proselytising documentary research, nor in promoting a wider understanding of the theoretical and methodological issues involved in their use. As John Tosh has recently observed, history students have in the past not generally been given formal instruction in the nature of their own discipline, which is an approach that leaves a great deal to chance. He continues that, above all, ‘students need to be aware of the limits placed on historical knowledge by the character of the sources and the working methods of historians’ (Tosh 2002, pp. xix–xx). Yet there is still very little on offer that explains and discusses the nature of documentary evidence in a systematic and sustained manner.

The issues involved in documentary research are rather different for social scientists. Over the past twenty years, at least, social scientists have largely neglected and ignored the use of documents in favour of methods in which they are actively involved in producing data for their own purposes. Interviews, questionnaires and direct observation have become the basic tools of social research, while documents are seen as of only marginal utility. In this respect, then, the purpose of this book is to show possible uses of documentary studies in a wide range of social research, and also some of the limitations and dangers to be avoided.

In pursuing this dual purpose, this book draws a number of examples from education, both contemporary and historical. Education is interesting and useful partly because of its role in incorporating and transmitting cultural heritages and traditions, that is, it forms a means to develop knowledge, understanding and values from one generation to the next. In these ways it is a key dimension of history, albeit one that does not always receive the attention it deserves (McCulloch and Richardson 2000). It is also a major feature of social and economic policy in modern societies, especially in the modern period in the form of national systems of schooling, universities and, most latterly, lifelong learning. Moreover, it is closely related to other social issues, involving for example youth, crime, religion and work, that are of interest to social scientists from a range of backgrounds. Education itself has close connections with a number of social scientific disciplines and traditions, such as sociology, social policy, anthropology‚ politics, psychology and law, and I will emphasise these interconnections in the chapters that follow.

There are very few works that examine in depth the role of documentary sources either in history or in social research. The most significant study of this type‚ John Scott’s book A Matter of Record, was published as long ago as 1990 (Scott 1990). Scott was interested in the handling of documents in relation to specific problems in social and historical research. He defined a document as ‘an artefact which has as its central feature an inscribed text’ (Scott 1990, p. 5). He gave most attention to the use of administrative papers produced by governmental and private agencies, which he regarded as the ‘single most important category of documentary sources used in social research’ (Scott 1990, p. 59), although he also included a chapter on mass communication and a short chapter on personal documents of various kinds. In the current work, while also stressing the importance of administrative records‚ I will give more extended attention to personal documents such as diaries, letters and autobiographies. I will also discuss the use of works of fiction as a tool of social research, unlike Scott, who neglected this kind of source. The impact of the Internet is also a key theme of the present work, which reflects something of the way that research in this area has changed since the publication of Scott’s work more than a decade ago.

Other recent works are also relevant to this present study but also have limitations as general appraisals of the role of documents in social research. Plummer’s (2001), for example, is a classic analysis of personal documents, but does not attempt to investigate public or official documentation. Carolyn Steedman has produced a highly provocative study of archives, entitled simply Dust (2001), but contents herself with this particular realm of documents. Lindsay Prior’s Using Documents in Social Research (2003) is a more general treatment, is interesting at a theoretical level and includes a number of useful examples of documents and their use. On the other hand it is not very accessible in its discussion of documents in action, and does not seek to develop a clear discussion of different types of documents, on the grounds that, as he argues‚ ‘The active document is usually too slippery a creature to fall neatly into such classificatory traps’ (Prior 2003, p. 28).

In my approach to the topic I should like also to give some consideration to the historical development of documentary studies in education, history and the social sciences. Very little has been written in this vein, although there are a number of interesting works on particular forms of documents and how these have developed over time. Plummer (2001, especially chapter 5) offers a useful discussion of the history of life history methods. Scott (1990) does not develop this kind of approach, even in relation to official records in which he is particularly interested. It is Gordon Allport’s work, published in the 1940s, that is most helpful in beginning to appraise the historical growth of this area of study. To be sure‚ Allport (1947) was himself concerned mainly with psychological dimensions of personal documents. Nevertheless, his interpretation was of wider significance for social science method in general, and for the notion that he put forward of a continuing process of building on previous work of this type to develop a research tradition. Sixty years on, further assessment and review of this nature seems overdue.

A further point about my approach to this work is that I emphasise the need to try to understand documents in relation to their milieux, or in other words to relate the text to its context. It is necessary to find out as much as possible about the document from internal evidence elicited from the text itself, but it is no less important to discover how and why it was produced and how it was received. Documents are social and historical constructs, and to examine them without considering this simply misses the point. For the same reasons, documents need also to be understood with reference to their author/s and to what they were seeking to achieve, in so far as this can be known. I therefore do not wish to align this work with post-structuralist critiques such as that of Roland Barthes which focus so closely on the text and its readership—‘textuality’—that they tend to deny the significance of the author and claim that the meaning can never be known (Barthes 1977; see also for example Young 1981; Burke 1992). I am also very interested in the potential link between past and present, but hopefully not at the expense of becoming ahistorical or anachronistic in my approach to documents, which must be interpreted in relation to the historical context in which they are produced (see McCulloch and Richardson 2000).

This leads on in turn to a further explanatory point, which is about my own personal and professional background and how this informs my outlook on documentary studies. I was trained as a historian, and it is second nature for me to use documents to peer into the past. I have spent long days of toil over many years in this pursuit. In doing so I have used many different kinds of documents, official and personal, publicly available and under lock and key. Most of my own research has centred on nineteenth-and twentieth-century England, although I have also spent several years researching in New Zealand. My interests have focused increasingly on education—the history of education, especially, but also the ways in which this history relates to our contemporary policies and problems (see for example McCulloch 1998). In addressing historical issues in education‚ I have always been concerned to relate them to broader social issues, to cultivate a social history of education that would be of interest both to educationists and to historians (McCulloch 2000a). Economic, cultural, political, geographical and many other issues have also been prominent in this work. In linking the past to the present‚ I have been keen to find frameworks and ways of working through which to bring them closer together. The ways in which I work with documents illustrate, indeed they permeate, these concerns. Documents can provide potent evidence of continuity and change in ideals and in practices, in private and in the public arena. They are a significant medium through which to understand the way in which our society has developed, and how it continues to develop. Yet they also reflect a basic tension in our society, a rupture between its present and its past. Documentary studies need to come to terms with this alienation from history, and to find ways of reconciling the historical with the contemporary.

Lastly‚ I should emphasise that this book is not intended to be simply about ‘method’ in a technical sense, although I do hope that it may be useful for students and scholars in thinking through the ways in which they work with documents. It is more broadly about ‘methodology’, that is, it is concerned with why and when to use documents, and not just with how to use them. And, more deeply, it tries to relate theory and methodology in documentary studies. Tim May has rightly argued that ‘The ways in which documents are used is clearly a methodological and theoretical question, as well as a matter for the technicalities that surround method’ (May 2001, p. 177). He adds that different approaches to documents are ‘fundamental to how we see our surroundings and ourselves’ (May 2001, p. 178). I should like to pursue this key theme further in this present work.

In approaching documents in this way, as in much else‚ I am conscious of the advice offered by C.Wright Mills in his classic work‚ The Sociological Imagination. Mills was insistent that theory and method should not be considered separately, but should always be related to each other, and also to actual problems. As he argued‚

For the classic social scientist, neither method nor theory is an autonomous domain; methods are methods for some range of problems; theories are theories of some range of phenomena. They are like the language of the country you live in: it is nothing to brag about that you can speak it, but it is a disgrace and an inconvenience if you cannot.

(Mills 1959, p. 121)

According to Mills‚ ‘Controversy over different views of “methodology” and “theory” is properly carried on in close and continuous relation with substantive problems’ (Mills 1959, p. 128). Grappling with these issues in this way was, for Mills, the best way to develop what he called ‘intellectual craftsmanship’. The key issue with which Mills himself was concerned was the distinction between ‘personal troubles’, in which an individual finds his or her values being threatened, and ‘public issues’, involving crises in institutional arrangements. In a time of rapid ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Social Research and Educational Studies Series
• Case Studies
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1: Introduction: Reading between the Lines
• 2: Paper Tigers Social Research and Documentary Studies
• 3: The Joy of Life Doing Documentary Research
• 4: Behind the Scenes Records and Archives
• 5: On the Record Printed Media and Literature
• 6: Life and Times Diaries, Letters and Autobiographies
• 7: A New Leaf Connections and Conclusions
• Bibliography