Life Documents

Life documents are secondary sources that involve the expression of feelings, emotions, thoughts that are used in everyday life.

They are personal documents and sources that have been created not for the purpose of research, but during the course of ordinary life. Diaries and letters are examples of life documents.

Life documents tend to be QUALITATIVE in nature as they are about what people think, and often how they feel.

They are expressions of ideas that might allow a researcher to understand what it means to be someone. In this way, using life documents might be seen to allow verstehen

A life history is a case study of one person’s life. An example is Thomas and Znaniecki’s (1919) study of Jenny, an ageing woman.

Plummer (1982) suggests that they are useful for helping you to understand the world from an individual’s point of view. They provide rich detail and can help to generate hypotheses.

Some feminists, such as Mies (1993) think that life histories can be used to help women understand their own situation and perhaps change their lives – e.g. life histories discussing domestic violence may help a woman decide to leave a violent partner.