Documentary Research: In Education, History and the Social Sciences

by Gary McCulloch

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 * analysing documents * legal frameworks and ethical issues * records and archives * printed media and literature * diaries, letters and autobiographies.

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

GaryMcCulloch is the inaugural Brian Simon Professor of the History of Education at the founding director of the International Centre for Historical research in Education at UCL Institute of Education. He was (2017-2019) the president of the British Educational Research Association and is past Editor (2015-2022) of the British Journal of Educational Studies. He is a past president of the UK History of Education Society (2005-2007) and a previous Editor of the international Journal History of Education (1996-2002). He has supervised a wide range of research students in the history of secondary and higher education, both nationally and internationally. He has attracted funding for research projects from the ESRC, Leverhulme Trust and the Society for Educational Studies, among others.

Reviews

[SJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're doing a documentary analysis for your dissertation, this book is quite good. There isn't as much written on how to work with documents as there is on things like surveys, etc, so this is proving to be useful.

[Ken Claassen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Useful, and surprisingly less dry than most academic, how-to, summary books of its type. Still academic, obviously. If the subject of qualitative research via printed documentation, past and present, interests you, give this one a look. Otherwise, skip it.