Social behavior is what organizes, builds, and maintains a society and its institutions. Structural Functionalism assumes all agents and institutions in a society are playing a role and serve a purpose to the extent that each is dependent on the other for continued existence. This theory is demonstrating the primary reason why research of historical materials and records are so important to the progress and success of the future. Archives are preserved materials that can be used as research tools offering a variety of valuable information like recipes or instruction manuals. Another utility of unobtrusive research is collecting evidence in crime analysis. Trying to recapture the past would be like being at a scene of a crime with no available eyewitness and having to piece together facts finding one clue that leads to the next. Information useful to social science research can be found from various traces and records created by human behavior whether intended to or not that provide us with clues giving a better understanding our past (Lune and Berg 2017).
Lune and Berg (2017) provide detail on the two different categories of archival records, public and private. The main difference between these two categories would be the way they are organized which is determined by the intended audience. Public records are created and maintained for a large audience, and this requires them to be reader friendly for the viewer. Public records are easy to access and contain systems of organization after the standard alphabetical and numerical indexes. Private records are not written or organized to accommodate a large audience due to the informal nature and are written for various reasons and viewed by small audiences. Public archives have many advantages for conducting research, as they are inexpensive to access, offer large amounts of information, and the materials do not conceal or alter the data when observed (Lune and Berg 2017). Unlike the previous methods discussed unobtrusive research studies human behavior without affecting it and the information collected is thereby intact and not distorted by human subjects. I would assume that data analysis or content analysis becomes simpler with public archives as your research method. Coding existing within the structured formats and systems already established in them could easily be used with your own design.
Within public archives there are four categories suggested by Webb and his colleagues (1966, 1981, and 2000). Modified to three subcategories of public archives in our text by Lune and Berg (2017): 1. media accounts 2. actuarial records and 3. official documentary records. Any form of media designed or created for mass consumption makes up the first public archive category known as commercial media accounts (Lune and Berg 2017). A popular example of this form is visual ethnographies where the researcher is using the image of actual subject matter to help illustrate information conveyed. Pictures, video recording, the World Wide Web and virtual reality are just some of the other outlets available to a visual ethnographer. Though visual ethnography is not limited to these media tools, it is putting a focus and emphasis on the visual presentation of the data. Actuarial records consist of any record that is specific to a certain audience but can also be accessed by the public under certain circumstances The downfall of these. records. Is the politically motivated content and other reasons the data may be tampered with or incomplete to conceal controversy which results in discredit of the information. Like actuarial records, documentary records are created for a limited specific audience, but are accessible by the public for research purposes. School records courtroom transcriptions, interoffice memos, and sales ledgers are some examples of official documentary records that contain valuable information for content analysis and unobtrusive research (Lune and Berg p.144, 2017). Going through the trash of the appropriate place relating to your research subject would be an excellent unobtrusive technique for obtaining documentary records without ever having to ask.
Private archives are custom to a smaller audience and include autobiographies, diaries, and letters. home movies and videos, and artistic and creative artifacts (Lune and Berg 2017). Discovery of these documents by the investigator is considered unsolicited while request of these documents would be solicited. Of all these private documents, the autobiography delivers the most in-depth personal accounts offering sociologist three different author styles for collecting. Comprehensive auto biographies are the most common form and start early in the authors life and cover their entire history from personal accounts. Topical autobiographies are not concentrated on the individual writing the bio, but on the topic or subject of the biography. The third category is edited autobiographies where researchers work as editors to streamline information. Diaries and online blogs would likely work for data collection sourcing. Autobiographies and blogs are perfect background content sources but are not to be mistaken as empirical data. Overall private archives can be used to provide insight on a person’s life and explain the times which it was written.
Our text concludes the portion on archival data by stressing that this option could be insufficient for research questions and suggests triangulation always be used in practice (Lune and Berg 2017). My research question could benefit from using archives in addition to obtrusive research methods. For example, I could use comments from online forums with practitioners describing how their life has changed since they started meditation. A major advantage of unobtrusive research methods includes the ability to produce data not distorted by nonreactivity. What way to do this? Is my collecting traces in physical items that are unconsciously left behind by the user erosion? Accretion measures make up the second the two categories of traces used by researchers. Physical evidence contains erosion measures which help investigators identify the degrees of use. Object accretion measures are natural deposits left by humans, they can be analyzed to form hypothesis about the material objects they are found on (Lune and Berg 2017). This can include dust, garbage, graffiti and almost any deposit left by humans can be considered accretion acting as clues to uncover data for researchers to study. It is important to understand researchers may conclude different concepts from the use of unobtrusive research and without triangulation is unclear if the conclusions correct.
Howard Lune, Bruce L. Berg (2017) Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences 9th Edition (QRMSS), Pearson
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