- Other texts: painting, drawings, maps, photographs

Personal documents- includes items such as letters, diaries and autobiographies. First person accounts of social events and personal experiences, often including feelings and attitudes.

Historical documents- personal or public documents created in the past.

- They may be the only available source of information, for example in studying the past.

- They are a free or cheap source of large amounts of data, because someone else has already gathered the information, saves the sociologists time.

Negatives:

- It is not always possible to gain access to them.

-Individuals and organisations create documents for their own purposes, not the sociologists, therefore may not contain answers to the kinds of questions the sociologist wish to ask.

Positivists tend to reject them other than as material for content analysis. they regard them as unreliable and unrepresentative sources. However they sometimes use content analysis on documents as a way of producing quantitative data.

Interpretivists' preference for documents comes from the fact they believe documents can give the researcher a valid picture.

Example - the polish peasant, Thomas and Zneniecki's - interactionists study of migration and social change used a variety of documents, including 764 letters bought after placing an advertisement in a polish newspaper (these included several autobiographies and public documents such as newspapers). These were used to reveal the meanings individuals gave to their experience of migration.

Because documents are not written with the sociologist in mind they are more likely to be authentic of the authors views, unlike questionnaires or interviews where the respondent knows that their answers are to be used for research purposes.

Invalid

Documents may lack validity, Scott identifies 3 reasons for this:

• Researchers may not be certain whether it is really written by the supposed author or whether it's a forgery.
• There is the issue of credibility, for example, if it was written a long time after the event key details may be forgotten. Politicians may write diaries or autobiographies intended for publication that produce a sell-serving account of the event (glossing over their mistakes).
• There is always the danger of the sociologists misinterpreting what the document actually meant to the writer, imposing their own meaning on the data.

Some groups may not be represented in documents, for example, the illiterate and those with limited leisure time.

The evidence in documents may not be typical in other documents that we do not have access to, not all documents survive or are available.

Thematic Analysis - It usually involves selecting a small number of cases for in depth analysis to reveal the underlying meanings that have been encoded in the documents. Criticisms - Unrepresentative sample, there is a tendency to select evidence that supports a sociologists hypothesis rather than seeking to falsify (Popper- unscientific). There is no proof that the meaning the sociologists give to the document is the true one.