Analyzing Documentary Accounts

Guides the reader through the use of documentary accounts as data sources.

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.