Book Review: Documentary Research in the Social Sciences by Malcolm Tight

Documentary research is ubiquitous within the social sciences. Most social research, whether qualitative or quantitative, involves documents, coupled with practices with those documents, during its unfolding. Endemic within the social sciences, documentary research “differs from other forms of research in that the objects of research (the data) exist already (in the form of documents). However, the processes involved in carrying out documentary research are analogous to, and should be just as rigorous as, those employed in other forms of social research” (Tight, 2019, p. 19). There are, in fact, many forms of social research and practices that depend heavily or exclusively on documentary research, such as library and archival science, historical research, policy research and analysis, literature and systematic reviews, secondary data analysis, and meta-analyses. Recognition of documentary research, however, remains seemingly underacknowledged, even taken for granted, in most discussions concerning social science and its variegated research projects and possibilities. In Documentary Research in the Social Sciences, Malcolm Tight—a professor of higher education studies with expertise in explorations into the complex nature of research—calls for greater attention to the importance of documentary research within the social sciences. Specifically, documentary research is indagation that, in one way or another, creates, concentrates on, or otherwise deals with or employs documents; or, put differently, it is research involving sundry work with heterogeneous documents. Conventional documents—namely, articles, assignments, books, chronicles, circulars, journals newspapers, reports, and so on—tend to be the principal objects of focus for most documentary research; however, documentary research also extends to and embraces wide-ranging and cross-disciplinary kinds of documents, such as drawings, pictures, films, maps, augmented and virtual reality, digital platforms, and software applications. Investigations involving documents do not necessarily create new data but, instead, analyze existing data instantiated within myriad documents. Claiming that “documents need to be treated with care,” Tight (2019, p. 18) argues that “undertaking research into documents . . . requires an appreciation and understanding of their purpose(s) and usage(s). No document should be treated as an objective tabula rasa or ‘tablet of stone’; rather, they have all been created by highly subjective and interested individuals such as you and me.” This appreciation and understanding can be developed by reflecting on four main questions (Tight, 2019, p. 18) while working with documents during one’s research activities, namely: