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

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 http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Aimee Grant is a Qualitative Researcher at the Centre for Trials Research, Cardiff University. She undertakes research on health, pregnancy and motherhood, drawing on a range of disciplinary fields including critical public health, sociology, human geography and cultural studies.