Skip to main content
Social Sci LibreTexts

7.3: Exploring Documentary Sources

  • Page ID
    76221
  • \( \newcommand{\vecs}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \) \( \newcommand{\vecd}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash {#1}}} \)\(\newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\) \( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\) \( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\) \( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\) \( \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \(\newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\) \( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\) \( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\) \( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\) \( \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)\(\newcommand{\AA}{\unicode[.8,0]{x212B}}\)

    Learning Objectives

    By the end of this section, you will be able to:
    ● Understand the variety of documentary sources available to researchers

    ● Explore documentary data analysis techniques such as content analysis

    Documentary sources can contain a wealth of information to address a research question. Documents here are treated as primary sources, or original source material that can help with answering some aspect of a research question. Documents need not be created at the time or place that we are interested in studying, however. For example, a scholar may have a research project focused on the codification of human rights post-World War II. A key document in this research would be the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).18 The researcher could locate a copy of the UDHR online or when visiting the United Nations headquarters in New York City, but it isn’t necessary for them to have access to the original document. In other research projects, however, access to original documents may be critical, for example actual ballots if the research concerns election fraud. But even in those cases, resource constraints and difficulties with procuring access to field sites may be insurmountable. Reports by credible organizations may substitute as enough documentary sources.

    Screen Shot 2020-11-17 at 5.50.39 PM.png
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed 10 December 1948, available online at https://www.un.org/en/universal-decl...-human-rights/

    This is an exciting time to draw on documentary sources because of the digitization of many documents. This has vastly increased accessibility to documents and decreased costs to researchers. The U.S. National Archives, for example, contains a wealth of documents that are cataloged on its website. Researchers may access digital documents in the National Archives through databases such as ProQuest, which is often available through university and community college libraries.19

    There are limits to documentary sources, as some political phenomena are not inherently text based. The rise of the bureaucratic state heralded the rise of documents in our lives, but many political activities are non-textual. Some examples include illicit activities such as human trafficking or smuggling. Yet so long as the illicit world must interact with the modern state at some point, for example in banking activities or as subjects of government reports, there is often some oblique way of obtaining documents to understand these seemingly undocumented topics.

    The variety of documentary sources available to a researcher will be a function of the researcher’s resources, access, and creativity. Some researchers are fortunate to have deep research pockets and can travel to far flung sites to collect documents. Compounding this is access to key sources, for example relationships with government officials in relevant bureaucracies. More typically, researchers will run into limits when it comes to resources and access. In these cases, and generally, a researcher must think creatively about which documents to search for to address a research question.

    One step is getting to know librarians and, related, the databases and archives that are available through libraries. Librarians often know about collections of documents, archives, or other repositories of key documents. To continue the U.S. National Archives example mentioned above, researchers today do not need to make costly trips to Washington, D.C., to search the Archives, as many documents are now available through subscription-based databases such as ProQuest.

    Another step is understanding the organizational landscape in which a given research topic is embedded. To continue the previous example of researching the codification of human rights, one starting point would be to explore UN archives, some of which are digitized and available online. Another tack would be to contact law school libraries to examine their collections. A researcher could also probe whether there are human rights lawyer associations which might

    have libraries open to researchers. Nongovernmental organizations active in human rights law might also have relevant documents, such as reports or recommended language for draft laws in various areas of human rights.

    After collecting documents, there are several ways to utilize them in research. One is drawing out key sections in collected documents to reference or quote from when writing up research findings. This can be as low-tech as manually highlighting passages on paper copies of documents and flagging them with sticky notes or going fully digital and using text-recognition software to search for key terms and passages on digital versions of documentary sources.

    Another way to utilize collected documents is to conduct content analysis on keywords or phrases. This can be as basic as counting the frequency a term appears in a set of documents. For example, if a researcher wanted to examine whether there was change over time in the codification of the human right to asylum, they might collect as many human rights-related treaties as possible from the UN, say during the period 1945 to 1985, then count the frequency of “asylum” in the documents and see whether this changed significantly over the chosen period of time. Quantitative methods such as factor analysis can also be used to determine whether there are underlying “factors” or common explanatory variables, which might explain the variation observed across documents.20 The actual mechanics of such techniques are beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is worthwhile knowing that documents may be analyzed and utilized in ways that go beyond their service as sources of quotable material.


    This page titled 7.3: Exploring Documentary Sources is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Josue Franco, Charlotte Lee, Kau Vue, Dino Bozonelos, Masahiro Omae, & Steven Cauchon (ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative (OERI)) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.

    • Was this article helpful?