Analyzing Documentary Accounts, Vol. 128

All kinds of human behavior are observed, written about, or documented. Ethnographers can be seen as "documentary accountants" — they observe and provide analysis. This book shows how to use documentary works as data sources and how qualitative and quantitative analysis techniques can be combined. It shows how care must be taken with sampling and coding and gives attention to reliability and validity issues, showing how to begin statistical exploration once the data are assembled.

Although ethnographic evidence has accumulated in fields ranging from organizational studies to sociology, these studies have not been fully exploited except as sources of descriptive data. Analyzing Documentary Accounts provides researchers with complete guidelines from mining ethnographic data through the use of new analytic techniques. Readers will find Analyzing Documentary Accounts the key to unlocking the rich data sources available in ethnographic material. Using examples from human relations and Hodson's workplace files, author Randy Hodson explains the benefits and limitations of the quantitative analysis of extant bodies of ethnographic evidence, ways to do reliability and validity checks, methods for coding the data, methods for analyzing multiple ethnographic studies, and suggestions for effectively combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies.