Week 7 - Archival Methods and Textual Sources

How do you derive useful evidence from existing documents and archives?

Archival methods is similar to document analysis.  In this class I learnt how to use historical and text-based data sources.  Specifically, originally I thought that this topic was going to be about how to analyse documents and text, however during the class I realized that there was a focus on archival documents from a historical perspective.  There was a bit of a mixed methods approach to show how some quantitative data could be used to help interpret qualitative data.  There was a strong focus on historical/archival documents as evidence and sources of data for business research.  Hence, when doing this kind of research there is a survival bias in the documents that survive and can be used for analysis.

This classed opened my eyes to the possibilities of doing two types of case studies:
1. contemporary case studies;
2. historical case studies.

Taking an earnings management perspective, the lecturer showed us a graph of reported earnings and internally reported earnings, which highlighted an important difference - that reported earnings were lower and smoother compared to internally reported earnings, as there was an incentive to report lower earnings based on external factors.  The interesting part was how archival/historical documents were used to identify events during history at particular times to explain particular peaks and toughs in reported earnings.  Therefore, documents are an important source of data to help explain certain patterns in observed quantitative data.  This provides evidence into the motivations for particular reported behaviour.  This EM example was a useful illustration of a mixed methods approach incorporating both qualitative and quantitative methodologies.  The quantitative side showed observed reported behaviour/patterns; the relationships between the variables, and the qualitative side explain why certain patterns took place.  With such a mixed methods approach it is possible to do some triangulation and obtain corroborating evidence.

Various sources of information were provided in order to access archival sources, such as various libraries and universities.