Week 6 Readings Response

The concept of qualitative research is mostly related to doing interviews and observations. Indeed, most of the discussions on the literature about this methodology give emphasis to these techniques. However, the analysis of texts from documents at the archives, or the internet or other mediums also offers a strong tool to develop qualitative research.

Chapter 10 in Gorman and Clayton explains how to do historical investigation and how this methodology can be applied to qualitative research. Although sometimes historical research is wrongfully related to just doing a description of events, its real value relies in that is a strong tool to answer the questions of why and how. In addition, it helps to study the context in which events took place. (see p. 173).

Just like other methodologies, doing historical investigation requires discipline and organization. In particular, emphasize is given in the importance of critically approaching historical sources and note taking. A critical approach of historical sources requires, among other things, analyzing the authenticity of the documents and its reliability. Finally, I will like to point out the fact that doing historical research does not mean that the researcher will not be able to study all the sources available, or even be able to find all the evidence (p. 168). About the latter, this is one of the mayor obstacles that researchers using government records face when dealing with issues of classification and government secrecy. Athan G. Theoharis explains how the study of the cold war era is adversely affected by the culture of secrecy indicating that “classification restrictions in effect ensured a distorted understanding of presidential decisions and priorities.” Because of this, researchers face the following dilemma: “how to interpret a knowingly incomplete record?” (Theharis, A Culture of Secrecy: The Government Versus the People’s Right to Know, p. 4)

From Silverman’s chapter on texts I found very useful his explanations about content analysis, both from and quantitative and a qualitative approach. This is form special interest of me because good part of my project will involve doing this type of research. What I see as essential for this type of analysis is the process of establishing categories, coding data, to be able to group the data in an organize way.