QUALITI METHODS BRIEFING No. 1 Rethinking Documentary Research: Multimodality, Dual Paradigms and the Emotional Context

An increasing interest in qualitative data archiving and data sharing raises interesting challenges for researchers in terms of the ways in which they approach and treat documentary data and other secondary sources. Exploring the potential of documents to make sense of complex social worlds enables a consideration of the distinctive and multidimensional qualities of ‘documents of life’. In ‘a qualitative sociological autopsy of gendered suicide’, a project of the Cardiff Node of the ESRC National Centre of Research Methods’, particular attention has been paid to the ways in which documentary data can be handled in a sociologically informed and qualitatively driven way.