Looking for Information by Donald O. Case Lisa M. Given

Author:Donald O. Case,Lisa M. Given
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781785609688
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Published: 2016-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

Historical analysis “Unobtrusive” methods are those that do not intrude into the phenomenon being studied. Participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, and (especially) experiments are all intrusive, because to some degree they alter the way that subjects behave. The people being observed might have behaved differently had an investigation not been conducted.

The notion of unobtrusive social research methods was popularized by Eugene Webb and various colleagues in a 1966 book on “nonreactive measures” (an updated version was published in 1981). The theme of that book was that social researchers were making too much use of experiments, surveys, and other direct observations, and ought to supplement (but not replace) their other sources of evidence with an examination of “traces” of human behavior. What is it that people leave behind (or take away) in the course of their lives? Webb, Campbell, Schwartz, Sechrest, and Grove (1981) used the geological analogies of accretion and erosion to discuss possible sources of data about past human behavior. Accretion takes place when humans leave something in their wake, such as records of their birth and death, or more mundane indicators of their behavior like the “favorites” pages recorded on their Web browser. Erosion is the removal of something, such as the worn bindings on popular library books or the way that the most sought-after films are absent from the shelves of the video rental store. Social researchers are like detectives in finding and interpreting these traces of behavior.

Of course, the interpretation of evidence from the past is an old idea. It forms the basis for the “hermeneutic circle” that underlies the interpretation of religious texts and the writing of history. Examination of national statistics on causes of death formed the basis for the earliest sociological investigations of suicide, by Durkheim (1951). In the twentieth century, examination of one author’s citations to the works of other authors became a major method of understanding what those authors had read (i.e., what information they used) and how that had influenced their thinking, as well as understanding larger issues of communication among scientists and scholars (Cronin, 1984; Leydesdorff, 1998; Zuckerman, 1987). Such studies of the past in no way affect the behavior of the persons of interest, and hence they are unobtrusive investigations.

There are two examples of unobtrusive research methods that will be explored here. The first is the traditional approach in history of examining a wide range of historical evidence and reasoning from that to build an explanation of past behavior. The second example will be the content analysis of email.

An example of historical research comes to us from Richmond (1988). Richmond’s description of information gathering and use in England in the latter Middle Ages is an ambitious act of narrative and understanding, because relatively little evidence exists of the fifteenth-century phenomenon he seeks to portray. However, one cannot help but be fascinated by what this historian does manage to piece together about a rather narrow aspect of information use in that distant time.

To establish his view, Richmond made use of primary

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