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Bryman: Social Research Methods: 3e

Chapter 21

http://www.socresonline.org.uk/2/2/7.html
In this article, Heather Elliott writes about the use of diaries as a qualitative research method, particularly in relation to medical sociology. She reports on a study in which people with musculo-skeletal health problems completed a diary for three weeks. These are researcher-driven rather than extant documents, and Elliott describes how the technique can be combined with more conventional interviewing to create the 'diary-interview' method.

http://facstaff.uww.edu/hoganj/ab.htm
This is the website of “a/b Auto/Biography Studies”, edited by Rebecca Hogan, Joseph Hogan and Emily Hipchen, all of the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. The articles are based the analysis of biographical and autobiographical documents, as well as papers exploring the complex relationship between these two styles of writing.

http://sru.soc.surrey.ac.uk/SRU11/SRU11.html
This article, written by Marcus Banks at the University of Oxford, outlines the use of visual data in social research. It looks firstly at the way in which anthropologists have used photographs, film and to document everyday life in “other” cultures, and then moves on to consider some of the ethical and political issues involved in producing such visual representations. Finally, the author discusses the idea of researchers and their informants collaborating to analyze and interpret visual data.

http://sshl.ucsd.edu/instruction/il/evaluate.html
By now you should be familiar with Scott’s (1990) four criteria to assess most textual documents, but for those that are produced online, some additional criteria may be relevant. This page, from the web site of the University of California at San Diego, provides a helpful summary of factors to consider when evaluating the quality of a Web-based document.

http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/2-00/2-00mayring-e.htm
This article, written by Philipp Mayring, discusses the issues involved in doing content analysis in qualitative rather than quantitative terms. The author helpfully outlines the basic principles of this form of content analysis, including the idea of ‘inductive category development’ and then goes on to summarize a number of interesting studies that have used this method to analyze documents, from mass media texts to interview transcripts, diaries and biographies.