and activities, this is a ‘Hell’s Angels Convention’. In part, we may engage with this story to find a solution to this puzzle. That we engage with this as a potential puzzle in search of potential solutions, is intimately dependent on some shared understanding of culture and cultural categories. Research has also focused on the text (and images) in such things as advertisements, magazine front covers, dating or ‘would like to meet’ adverts, as well as magazine articles and newspaper reports.
So work has ranged from focusing on a single headline, a single article or a single publication to a very large number of national and international newspapers. With studies that work with a larger archive, you obviously somehow have to make your archive manageable. For example, Seale (2002) studied how cancer is portrayed in regional and national newspapers across different cultures. His archive was based on one week’s newspaper publications from the English-language press all over the world that contained the words ‘cancer’ and ‘leukaemia’ or ‘leukemia’. His choice to concentrate on just one week’s press was driven by various practical concerns, including:
Generating a manageable number of articles. His initial search generated 2,419 English-language articles.
The cost of identifying and gathering this amount of material. He went through a specialized company that collates the material and emails it to you. These days, you can use various news-based search engines and databases, often for free.
He only worked on articles written in English due to the cost of and potential problems with translation.
You need to be aware that simply finding, collecting, sifting through and then physically and/or electronically working with a large number of articles can take large amounts of time and money.
Another massive potential source of documents for research are academic publications. These can range from publications in the areas of the sciences and medicine, to the arts and humanities and the social sciences and can be either more historical or more contemporary documents. Obviously, the term ‘historical’ is contingent, and can refer to anything from documents produced ten years ago to, say, 300 years ago (and more). A lot of contemporary work is focused on analyzing the contemporary or historical academic articles and books of other researchers. Much of this work rarely offers a novice reader any hint as to how the materials included were discovered or selected (or even analyzed).
As with much research work, analyzing academic publications involves a lot of common-sense practices and some related detective work. Emerging from some research I was doing on how social researchers conduct qualitative interviews, drawing on audio files of actual interviews, I wanted to discover what researchers are told interviewing should look like, what prescriptions of ideal practice were being promoted. I felt this was important as qualitative interviewing had become the method of choice in the social sciences, especially in sociology, and so a vast array of literature on ‘how to be a good interviewer’ existed. I already knew of some of the key texts to focus on. In part this was because these were the articles and books that ‘everybody’ seemed to reference when justifying their choice of using interviews. I went to these articles and books and looked at their reference lists and followed the trail back, a practice known as ‘reference chaining’. I then found these articles and repeated the process. It is a hit-and-miss affair; some were highly relevant whilst others were redundant. I also conducted some web-based searches, looking 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
