TYPES OF DATA

WORDS NUMBERS NONVERBAL REPRESENTATIVES: Behavioral analysis

WORDS
Running records Webb (1966)
Records kept over time To find out about such things as changing patterns or past conditions Provide clues to the speakers state of mind , intention, goals and perceptions
Subjectivity and context
In interpreting verbal data , it is difficult to avoid reading your own subjective meaning into the material .

example : when a student writes that a building is large and imposing , does she mean it positively or positively .

Another way to interpret what someone means is to know the context of his expressions George 1959 Who is writing to whom under what circumstances Frequency and non frequency coding:
It can be useful how often a theme or a word appears in written documents

Coding Unit: There is no rule what to record , the best one can do is choose a coding unit that is neither too broad to be irrelevant nor too narrow to make the writers strategy invisible. It may be a word ,a clause , a sentence , or the composite theme of the entire document

NUMBERS
BUREAU OF CENSUS: It is major source of easily accessible archive which contains data from the census of population. It includes more detailed summary statistics such as the number of unit in particular type of buildings.
INSTITUTIONAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL RECORDS: Through numbers one can determine the exact type and format of data they contained as well as their completeness.

 Organized numerical files may reduce the need to collect raw data, but that may still require analysis to determine their appropriateness.

NONVERBAL REPRESENTATION
Nonverbal Representation includes: Diagrams Photographs Plans

A major source of data is the analysis of behavioral implications of nonverbal and non-numerical representations. Behavioral plan analysis is used as the basis for focused interview questions with designers about their design intentions.

Deposit and survival

Deposit and survival:

Once an investigator gains access to a digital or paper file, she must determine which out of all possible documents are included in the file. Are all significant documents there? Have some been excluded or suppressed? Have some been deleted or weeded out? Selective deposit, self selective deposit, and selective survival are processes influencing what is deposited to document files and what survives over time.

Selective deposit:
It refers to the fact that what is put into files depends not only on what documents are generated but also on which documents an archivist decides to keep to limit data storage needs. EXAMPLE:
In her newspaper analysis for Twin Rivers, Keller in initial interviews found that when Twin Rivers residents first moved to the area, they were dissatisfied but according to the residents, the editor of Twin Rivers newspaper did not report all their outbursts. Instead it reported dangerous problems of access to the public school by children and cars. Keller incorporated this insight about the editors point of view into her understanding of the role a small newspaper plays in the development of a new community. Keller honored the difference between the data she gathered from the two methods. She felt that multiple-method approach was more significant in collecting any information.

Self selective deposit:

No intermediary editor or archivist is involved. Selfselective deposit is some times determined not by individual volition but by structural constraints in a setting or organization. A significant influence on self-selective deposit is the degree to which archives are meant to be evaluated by supervisors.
EXAMPLE: In the study of school property damage, Zeisel inquired that how much money was spent on various types of damage and what types of damage were there? Blau compared the performance of workers in competitive and cooperative offices. He used the records the office supervisor kept and noticed the officers behaviour when job offers call comes.

Selective survival:
Housekeeping documents such as memos may be routinely, systematically, or casually deleted when the file is archived for a long time. As the authors of Unobtrusive measures point out, using archival records frequently means substituting someone elses selective filter for your own.