Documentary research paper

Documentary research is an effective method that helps to receive important information. Let’s look at this term definition attentively and it will help us understand why it is so popular and important nowadays. According to different informational sources we can mark that documentary research is the use of text and documents as source materials. We can find newspapers, certificates, novels, films, diaries and innumerable other written, pictorial and visual sources among them. This kind of research has its own advantages and disadvantages that will be discussed in the next paragraph.

The main advantage of documentary research involves a possibility to use outside sources and to support an argument or viewpoint of an academic work with their help and to look at “official” explanation and presentation of different facts. Documentary research allows analyzing information in both quantitative and qualitative ways. This research can impose authors opinion to researcher in relate to other research methods because each document was written for a particular purpose and it has own specific context. Its limitation implies one-sidedness of information in comparison to other methods, and it also reflects work not with primary but with secondary sources.

Based on all the above said, we could come to the conclusion, that documentary research requires high qualification analytical level, but in comparison to other methods it is available and not expensive. Sometimes it is better to use exactly this method instead of experimentation, surveys or ethnographic field work, because it allows to analyze information in specific way and receive information about the last events that is impossible to observe by own eyes.

Documentary research quite often allows exposing tendencies and dynamics of their changes and development.

Thereby it helps to make general conclusions more clear and understandable to the ordinary person.



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