Analyzing Documentary Accounts

✍ Scribed by Randy Hodson

• Publisher: Sage
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 94
• Series: Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences (Volume 128)
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Although ethnographic evidence has accumulated in fields ranging from organizational studies to sociology, these studies have not been fully exploited except as sources of descriptive data. Analyzing Documentary Accounts provides researchers with complete guidelines from mining ethnographic data through the use of new analytic techniques. Readers will find Analyzing Documentary Accounts the key to unlocking the rich data sources available in ethnographic material. Using examples from human relations and Hodson's workplace files, author Randy Hodson explains the benefits and limitations of the quantitative analysis of extant bodies of ethnographic evidence, ways to do reliability and validity checks, methods for coding the data, methods for analyzing multiple ethnographic studies, and suggestions for effectively combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

✦ Table of Contents

Analyzing Documentary Accounts
Contents
Acknowledgments
Series Editor's Introduction
1. Introduction
Documents as Data Sources
Introduction to Content Analysis
Ethnographies as an Example
Epistemological Considerations
When Is Document Analysis Appropriate?
2. Successful Applications and Extensions
Two Foundation Projects
Anthropology's Human Relations Area Files
Social Movement Event Analysis
Workplace Ethnographies
Available Extensions
3. Selecting and Coding Documents
Selecting Cases
Population Size and Sampling
Search Strategies
An Example
Coding the Data
The Coding Instrument
Avoiding Inference
Coder Training
Reliability Checks
Subtopic Analysis
Electronic Scanning and Autocoding
4. Analyzing Documentary Accounts
Common Statistical Techniques
Bivariate
Multivariate
Scales and Missing Data
Statistical Inference
Outliers and Deviant Cases
Qualitative Comparative Analysis
Qualitative Data Analysis Software
Summary
5. Reliability and Validity
Reliability and Bias in Coding
Reliability and Bias in the Accounts
An Example
Additional Reliability and Bias Checks
Evaluating Validity
Construct Validity and Theory Development
6. Summary
Why Analyze Documents?
Guidelines for Implementation
Strengths
Limitations
Contributions to Social Science Knowledge
A New Window on the Social World
Appendix
References
About the Author