Doing Conversation, Discourse and Document Analysis. Tim Rapley

or video recordings of these practices as they occur. And in the chapters that follow, I will further unpack how to generate and work with audio- and video-based data.

      Some closing comments

      Hopefully you have gained just a few ideas about the potential sources of materials you could work with and are not too overwhelmed by the sheer number of options you have available to you. Ideally, what you need to do is get a very general sense of what the focus of your research is, what approach you are going to take, and therefore you will be in a position to make a decision about what materials you are going to generate your findings and conclusions from.

      Key points

       You should generate an archive – a diverse collection of materials that enable you to engage with and think about the specific research problem or questions. Your archive could contain document-based sources as well as audio- and visual-based sources.

       Read other academic work on your specific topic and find out what research materials they used and how they collected them.

       Rather than solely relying on researcher-initiated audio- and visual-based materials – for example, interviews or focus groups – some academics argue that you should focus on ‘naturally occurring’ data.

      Further reading

      These sources explore in a little more detail the methods I addressed in this chapter:

      Barbour, R. (2018) Doing Focus Groups (Book 4 of The SAGE Qualitative Research Kit, 2nd ed.). London: Sage.

      Brinkmann, S. and Kvale, S. (2018) Doing Interviews (Book 2 of The SAGE Qualitative Research Kit, 2nd ed.). London: Sage.

      Gidley, B. (2012) ‘Doing historical and archival research’, in C. Seale (ed.), Researching Society and Culture, 3rd ed. London: Sage, pp. 263–82.

      Scott, J. (1990) A Matter of Record: Documentary Sources in Social Research. Cambridge: Polity Press.

      Taylor, S. (2001) ‘Locating and conducting discourse analytic research’, in M. Wetherell, S. Taylor and S.J. Yates (eds), Discourse as Data: A Guide for Analysis. London: Sage, in association with The Open University, pp. 5–48.