Finding Subjugated Knowledge: Personal Document Research

Abstract

In the November 1992 issue of Social Work, Editor-in-Chief Ann Hartman called for the profession to search for subjugated She claimed that privileged scientific research methods had silenced the voices of disenfranchised, powerless groups in society by refusing to recognize their claim to legitimate knowledge, even of their own experiences. With the growing recognition that all knowledge is partial, limited, contextual, and political, many other voices have joined the chorus for change, predicting a qualitative research paradigm shift that would broaden the criteria for determining valid, reliable, and useful social work knowledge. This shift would bridge the gap between practitioners and researchers and allow clients a greater opportunity to be heard (Rodwell, 1987). However, some ethnic and cultural groups and even research traditions have difficulty having their views aired, much less having them accepted. Whether the predicted shift occurs or a new research configuration emerges depends not only on the ability to be heard, but also on the importance and relevance of the research produced. Unfortunately, as Karger (1983) pointed out, there is no qualitative method being vigorously advocated by the proponents of change to offset the institutionalized power of the quantitative methods now being taught in schools of social work. This article offers document research as a qualitative methodology that attempts to redress the imbalance of power between the client and the researcher by allowing both to have their say within the context of their own stated methodological concerns and assumptions. Using my own experience, I show the contributions document research can make to social work knowledge, practice, and values. Personal Document Research Bogdan and Taylor (I 975) defined documents as first-person account of the whole or a part of his or her life or an individual's reflection on a specific topic or event (p. 96) and can include autobiographies, diaries, letters, journals, oral histories, or other raw materials authored by a single person. Personal documents are different from other personalized documentary accounts such as biographies; case records; public letters; and cultural or collective records of groups, countries, or classes in their emphasis on first-person descriptions of individual experience and everyday life. These other records may be important secondary sources of personal, cultural, and historical information and useful for contrast and comparison, but they are not documents. In fact, much like the historian, the document researcher must actively search out, collect, categorize, and authenticate the various sources of and public disclosure. Personal documents can be solicited or unsolicited, limited or comprehensive, complete or edited. Personal documents can be of any length, from a single interview to multiple contacts of any duration. The documenter can be known or unknown to the researcher, a historical figure or an ordinary person, alive or dead. He or she can be selected randomly or chosen deliberately to represent a certain category, problem, or characteristic and can be the result of chance discovery or a volunteer. Even the idea of research can be planned or spontaneous, a product of a long negotiation or quick agreement. Despite the early promise of document research, the method was abandoned in the face of demands by society for fact-based solutions to social problems. Opting for scientific respectability and objectivity, statistics became the hard currency of social work researchers. Fortunately, recent challenges to the alleged hardness of social scientific facts and the appeals to the profession to reintroduce the client's voice into the knowledge-power equation have revitalized interest in document research (Holbrook, 1986). Much of the credit belongs to the feminist research perspective that recognized that the personal is political (Reinharz, 1992; Sands & Nuccio, 1992). …