Personal Documents as Data Sources for Social Sciences. A Review of History of Uses, Ethical, Methodological and Epistemological Considerations

Abstract

This article envisages critically present the use of the personal documents, looking from a historical perspective at how it was practiced in different paradigms in the humanistic-social sciences. The exposé also considers the methodological and the ethical implications of using the method, underlining, in this respect, the aspects related to the preservation and reuse of the materials of this kind. By putting into balance the trumps and downsides of the personal documents method, the article highlights, in fact, the importance of using the personal documents method in studying a wide range of specific problems of the humanistic-social sciences. The ultimate purpose of the article is, therefore, that of prompting the social scientists to look more carefully and more trustingly at the alternative of choosing the personal documents method, as a potential powerful tool for sociological research, providing them, at the same time, with possible directions in discerning between the favourable and unfavourable situations for using it.

The use of diaries in psychological research: The creative and dialogical intimacy of self-other-world relationships in the context of cultural mutations

“…As previously suggested, the use of spontaneous or requested personal documents for research purposes is nothing new in the humanities and would emerge with special interest in the social sciences and psychology in the late XIX century and in the early XX century (Alport, 1942; Cucu-Oancea, 2012; Elliott, 1997). The tradition of autobiographical studies, or even of personal documents, was approached as a special way of accessing subjective intimacy, the singular quality of experience.…”

“…In that work, the author differentiates three types of personal documents that could be a source of data for the social scientist: (i) unsolicited personal intimate diaries , without interference from the research context; (ii) the memorial as an impersonal report on a sequence of events, with the actor being temporally distant from its event; and (iii) the inventory , as periodic or daily reports on events and their moments of occurrence, such as expenses, readings, symptoms, or trips. Cucu-Oancea (2012) adds that research diaries can also be thematic and self-reflective, leading participants to a work of self-exploration. Following the example of the research undertaken by Traversa (2021), Albanian students were guided to produce “body-diaries”, that is, reflective writings on the experience of corporeality, in terms of the agentivity of the sensations of pleasure and pain in everyday experiences, as well as in sexuality and the various embodied forms of relating to the other, in an autobiographical and anonymous elaboration.…”