Doing Conversation, Discourse and Document Analysis. Tim Rapley
for the much more recent literature on qualitative interview methods. I found and read the more ‘basic’ how-to methods texts (much like this one) and the more ‘scholarly’ philosophical and methodological debates. I also gathered a collection of research articles that used qualitative interviews as a method.
In the end, I had a massive pile of photocopied articles and chapters, and a large collection of library books (and library fines). During all this time, I tried to arrange the debates that emerged into some kind of order: to trace the patterns and similarities as well as to spot the moments of disjuncture. In my initial period of generating my archive, I was overwhelmed; it was tricky to form a reasoned division between the different texts I was reading. Over time, it became much easier as I developed a sense of the different discourses on ‘how to be a good interviewer’. After several failed attempts, I finally developed a typology of the different methodological prescriptions that was both coherent and, most importantly, reflected the materials in my archive.
A further source of materials are government publications and parliamentary debates. Most governments produce a large number of publications, which are often available for free over the web. They routinely outline directions of future policy and/or strategy and in so doing review contemporary debates and research on specific issues. These documents are often a wonderful source to discover and map specific discourses, especially as they document past and forthcoming (or foreshadow potential) changes in the legislation and/or the organization of society and social institutions. In the UK, the debates in the House of Commons and House of Lords are all recorded in a series of books called Hansard. You can trace the trajectory of debates from the legalization of cannabis to the Sexual Discrimination Act. As these are all public documents, in that anyone can have access to them, your immediate concerns are centred on getting physical access to them and then being able to navigate through the vast quantity of materials.
In the UK, you can also get access to some of the private documents of governmental departments, those documents not initially deemed for external consumption. These can include letters or memos between civil servants in government departments, between civil servants and various non-governmental experts or organizations, as well as international correspondence. For example, Gidley (2003) used documents from the The National Archives in London to help him explore the experience of East London Jewish Radicals in the early twentieth century. As individuals in these groups were closely monitored by the British police and other government departments, he found a wealth of material including police-made transcriptions of anti-war meetings and reports of the various venues they congregated in. Through engaging with this archive, he not only discovered something about the radical groups themselves but also a history of the policing and governing of these communities.
As with government-based documents, you can generally get access to non-governmental organizations’, corporations’, charities’ and institutions’ public documentation. Most organizations have some form of public face or public documentation, ranging from promotional leaflets to press releases and company reports. Again, these enable you to engage with and trace specific fields and trajectories. If your focus was on the various discourses surrounding smoking, you may search for leaflets and literature from anti- and pro-smoking charities, reports from the governing bodies of medical professions and press releases from tobacco manufacturers. Obviously, these sources may make up only part of your archive. Getting access to these types of organizations’ private, internal or in-house documents – their ‘behind the scenes’ persona – is often extremely difficult and usually involves either already knowing someone on the inside, sheer persistence, or just plain luck.
Sources that are routinely under-used by many social scientists are diaries, biographies, literature and poetry. Obviously, diaries and biographies, given their apparently more factual status than literature, clearly offer us access to whatever period or practice the person is describing. Historically speaking, unless the subject was reasonably famous (for whatever reason) and therefore these diaries were actually published, just being aware of their existence could be problematic. However, the rise of blogging has changed this. Blogs can be a fascinating and easily accessible source of descriptions of mundane, routine, everyday activities and experiences as well as more esoteric practices and political standpoints. Alongside this, literature and poetry, albeit often named as fiction, can beautifully document historical and contemporary social and cultural ideas and practices. For example, contemporary ‘chick lit’ fiction nicely documents a range of versions of femininity (and masculinity). Such fictional accounts are never irrelevant or outside our social worlds, but rather offer another way to reflect on a specific topic or idea.
The web is useful not only as a space through which you gain access to specific documents. User-generated content is fascinating, from blogs and forums, to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, all aspects of human life are available to discover. However, when working with this as data, you should seriously consider whether you should ask the participants for permission to quote from them. Some forums I belong to do not support any of the postings being used as research material.
Some practical considerations when working on documents
Getting physical access to documents is important. One of the obvious starting places is to search on the Internet. You can often find some of the documents you need, or at the very least learn where you need to go to find them. There are now many web-based directories of specialized libraries, and their material might be available online.
Another solution is your nearest university or public library. You often find that they do not have exactly what you need. You then need to discover if this material can be ordered in from another library. This is not always a satisfactory solution, as some libraries will put restrictions on the number of documents you can request at any one time or you may not be able to order some of the material at all. Also, a lot of the time you may not know whether that article, that book or that magazine you have ordered is something you really need until you actually get to read it.
If your research is reasonably specialized, or is focused on historical documents, you will probably have to visit specialized libraries (often known as archives). In the UK, examples of these archives include The National Archives (official archive of the UK Government), The Women’s Library and the National Film and TV Archive. Some libraries’ collections have restricted access, which may mean you need to get some form of special permission to visit them. This permission can range from a letter from your supervisor or university to becoming an (honorary) member of that institution. Others may have open access. In the majority of the cases you will have to visit such specialist libraries in person.
You may also have restricted access to documents in other ways:
Although a huge volume of government documents are released and available for public scrutiny, some files are ‘closed’. This is especially the case with military and espionage reports, where documents may be closed and then only released into the public domain after a set number of years. And even when they are ‘opened’, some of the words may be obscured, some pages or whole files removed.
When documents have been produced for ‘internal’ consumption in an organization or between individuals, you will generally have some problems getting access to them. You may even have problems finding out that they exist at all! Obviously, to get access to such documents you will have to negotiate with the specific organization or individuals you are working with.
Depending on your focus, you may end up working with some documents that employ very technical or specialized language, abbreviations or conventions. However, during the course of your research, as you become more submerged in your field, you should hopefully become more familiar with the language that those who are already members of the area take for granted. In such cases, it may be possible to use a ‘technical’ dictionary to initially help you, or you may have access to an insider to provide relevant translations. Also, reading other accounts of the area, often written by other social scientists, can help you learn about the forms and routines of the language.
In some areas you will discover that a potential key document, or series of documents, will be written