定性研究课程2：Document of Life深入专题
Introduction:
Documents of life (DoL) is a conceptual and methodological approach or framework for research rather than a set of methods. DoL are everyday material items like text messages, photographs, instructions on consumer goods, and other such things.
The context in which the DoL framework has originated, been codified, and developed has been that of the much-invoked “turns” characterising intellectual life of the post-1945 period. These are interdisciplinary and postdisciplinary and include the linguistic turn and emphasis on natural language, the turn to narrative and storytelling, the reflexive turn to lives and auto/biographical accounts, the postmodern turn and postreferentiality and posthumanism, and overarching these is the cultural turn with its emphasis on cultural assemblage and the making of meaning in social life.
The key ideas associated with DoL concern the everyday and its organisation, the textually mediated character of social life, the reflexive subject, storied lives, the social construction of facticity, and the situated character of the researcher.
What continues to distinctively characterise DoL work is its analytical attentiveness to the everyday and quotidian aspects of social life and how people go about the business of living their lives and understanding things that happen. This is accompanied by a guiding respect for people being at its centre, with the DoL framework viewing them as subjects and enquiring and sense-making agents of their lives. As part of this, the focus is on the DoL produced and used in social life, importantly including everyday written, visual, oral, and other kinds of texts including those of material culture. These help organise everyday social life and include many found or naturally occurring examples and also those made around the questions and analyses of researchers.
Work within the DoL framework critically engages with positivist and realist thinking and ways of working. In particular, it takes issue with some of the more simplistic approaches to facts and resists seeing numbers and words, and materiality and social construction, as binaries and instead sees them as mutually constitutive. Overall, it takes a broadly constructionist view and eschews an oversystemic view of social life in favour of exploring social structures at different levels of the social order.
The rise of the DoL framework occurred during the period when constructionist thinking was at the height of its influence, with this impacting significantly on its substantive concerns and conceptual framing (Atkinson & Houseley, 2003). At the same time, now current DoL thinking has taken on board many if not all of the ideas associated with deconstructionism and posthumanism including a more analytical engagement with the accounts provided by people, and it avoids the referential fallacy by seeing these as motivated and situated, as indeed are the analytical accounts produced by researchers. Relatedly, it adopts a modest approach to its own activities and recognises similarities with as well as differences from everyday enquiries. It has also a modest approach to the knowledge claims made from its research, in ensuring these stay close to the particular documents or texts that form the evidential base. The DoL framework now has a greater interdisciplinary ethos, with the methodological eclecticism present from the outset in DoL research having been reinforced by subsequent interdisciplinary encounters. However, the emphasis on everyday DoL, viewing the subject in agentic terms, recognition of the partial perspectives of researchers continue to contribute to its strong core.
Overview of Using Documents in Social Research
The explicit aim of UDSR is to (a) enlarge the technical repertoire for researchers who work with documentary materials, (b) develop enlightened practices for using documents in research, and (c) provide a theoretical framework in achieving the two previous aims.
DoL is a framework, not a theory or methodology or method, and it is likely to remain such. Its permeable borders and interdisciplinary concerns, and its subject matter and ways of working, are not easily confined to programmatic rules and requirements. It was initially characterised by fragmentation, then underwent a period of codification, while more recent developments and expansions have involved different trajectories of activity that suggest a kind of refragmentation in interdisciplinary terms. That is, many DoL proponents have taken up ideas from one or more of its interdisciplinary cognate areas, such that it is now difficult to distinguish between what is DoL work and what “belongs” to these other areas of related activity. These new directions have also included a less humanist and considerably more critical way of thinking about the subject, an engagement with found more than made DoL, and a renewed engagement with temporality in positioning documents in time around the sequential and serial features that characterise many of the DoL.
Preliminary Analytical Toolkit
(1) Framing
(2) Author & reader positionality
· Who is the author and who is the intended reader
(3) Intertextualities
(4) Re-reading – reading against the grain, a resistant or non-compliant reading
(5) Moderatum generalisation: what claims can be made?
Make sure the following 4 aspects are included in your analysis, although it is usually best to do (iii) first ie the details of the text
i. Context 1: broader socio-historical context in which document was produced
ii. Pre-text / the immediate circumstances (for instance, organisational/institutional) of text’s production
iii. The text (starting with a preliminary reading and then a closer reading)
iv. Context / audience & viewers, social context in which it is read/known.
The Text: preliminary reading
- If helpful, line number everything in the text for analysis
- Generate a preliminary ‘fact-based’ reading, read & map with the grain of the text; do NOT at this stage leap to an interpretation of meaning, instead first find out how text works
- This preliminary reading could include taking some draft notes on the following:
How the reader is implied & positioned
Examine for the author function
Look for intertextualities
Anything else relevant from the preliminary toolkit?
Overall, is it an open or closed text & what things signal this?
The Text: Close Reading
- Having done your preliminary reading, you should then know what analytical tools you’re going to use to put more depth to your reading.
- Read in detail, section by section; and line by line within a section. Use this to map the structure and content in close detail, so you can point to specific lines, sentences, sections, to justify your reading.
- Having made a ‘reading with the grain’, decide your moderatum generalisations
Context 1
- Are there any indications of when (historical period) the document was produced. What is the relevance for the text?
Pre-Text
- Is a pre-text implied at any point?
- Are there references to a boss text or master text?
- Are there signs of a text being produced around a template, suggestive of there being a paper trail or auditing aspects?
Context 2
- How might it be circulated? Who for?
- Does the text operate in ways which lead to ‘decontextualisation’ ( i.e. when the text becomes the reality, not what happens ‘on the ground)? What is your evidence for this?
- Is the text agentic in other ways within the broader context? If so, pin down what this consists of. And if not, then explore why this is so.
- Is a resistant reading needed & what is the basis for this?
Points to think about
- Avoid premature interpretation! No interpretation until you have read with the grain in close detail and you know exactly how the text works in its own terms
- ‘Mapping’ a text by a close very detailed reading enables & supports judicious sampling (necessary when documents are very long, or when there are many of them)
- Re-reading or reading against the grain or interpretation – these all require a ‘mapping and close detailed reading’ first
- If your interpretations follow from a solid detailed reading, and your interpretations are organised around moderatum generalisations, this puts your analysis on a very solid basis. Others might challenge the interpretation – but you can point to the details of your reading and interpretation to support your analysis.
