Practical Social Investigation by Richard Lampard Christopher Pole

Author:Richard Lampard, Christopher Pole [Richard Lampard, Christopher Pole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Research, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317903475
Google: iqW9CgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-15T02:49:22+00:00

The sections that follow echo Scott's last two criteria by considering the important issues of sampling and interpretation, but before this his authenticity and credibility criteria are briefly considered.

Documents lack authenticity if they are not what they implicitly or explicitly claim to be. Forged letters and diaries are not unknown (e.g. the Hitler diaries publicised by newspapers in the early 1980s and subsequently found to be forgeries; see Harris, 1986); forged paintings are perhaps proportionally more common. Assessing the authenticity of a document may involve examining both its internal consistency and also its consistency with external sources of information (Piatt, 1981). However, credibility is perhaps more likely to be a pertinent issue: the author of a document may intend to be misleading, or may unintentionally be inaccurate. There are a range of economic, ideological and social motives for insincerity (e.g. in the context of documents such as publicity materials, political propaganda and letters to family members), and the author's sincerity may be negated by 'honest mistakes', or by false inferences, or by their deception by a third party. The researcher needs therefore to reflect on factors which may have affected the author's desire and/or ability to convey accurate information via the document.

However, Scott (1990: 123) notes that where earlier researchers have already assessed documentary sources, the authenticity and/or credibility of the documents may not appear to be a problem. There are also occasions when the lack of credibility of an author may in itself be of interest. Howard (1996) notes in his biography of the film director Michael Powell that Powell's own autobiography (Powell, 1986) contains accounts of non-existent social encounters and therefore lacks credibility in a way that can arguably be viewed as illustrating the director's penchant for 'fantasy'. This example thus relates to an important issue that we have already touched upon: are documents being used as sources of information about past events, or about the author, or is it the document's text itself that is of central interest?

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