Analysing documents

In the context of this chapter, it might be useful to think about two broad ways in which documentation is used in criminological research. One relates to doing a literature review where you might search out and collate an array of material which you might ‘read’ (analyse) for a specific purpose (for more on the purpose and types of literature review, see Chapters 1 and 3 in this volume). Another way in which documents are used is as a research resource to be excavated. Documentary analysis is a research term which masks, and can invite, different methods for ana- lysing documents, including content analysis, discourse analysis (also called narrative or semiotic analysis) and critical discourse analysis (for examples of how media texts can be analysed, see Mawby, 2010). Documents come in many differ- ent forms, none of which are value-free or ‘objective’, thus content, discourse or critical discourse analysis can be used to question a document’s authenticity, cred- ibility and representativeness.

Criminologists analysing media news stories find that certain combinations of news values guarantee a story as more or less newsworthy (see Jewkes, 2015). Children as victims of sexual abuse and perpetrators of it tend to be highly newswor- thy (see Greer, 2017; Jewkes, 2010; Mawby, 2010). Systematic literature reviews are another way in which analysis can be affected – see Box 12. 2 which outlines how a citation network analysis was applied to a literature review, and from this a frame- work model was developed.

In my own research project on child sexual abuse, I used literature to familiarise myself with the nature and impact of child sexual abuse and the existing debates sur- rounding it. My initial trawl for this purpose included a search and read of official inquiry documentation – initially in the UK: the publications emanating from the Cleveland Inquiry 1988 and subsequent inquiries up to the Jay Report (2014), media reports, local and regional safeguarding and inspection reports of children’s services, for example those by Casey (2015a and b) for the Department for Communities and Local Government inquiring into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham. I also scru- tinized police and non-governmental organization reports, for example the joint

BOX 12. 2 SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEWS AND ANALYSIS – AN EXAMPLE

Long Weatherred, J. (2015) ‘Child sexual abuse and the media: a literature review’,

Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 24(1): 16–34.

ABstract

The media play an important role in practice, policy and public perception of child sexual abuse, in part by the way in which news stories are framed. Child sexual abuse media coverage over the past 50 years can be divided into five time periods based on the types of stories that garnered news coverage and the ways in which public policy was changed. This systematic literature review of research on child sexual abuse media coverage across disciplines and geographic boundaries examines 16 studies published in the English language from 1995 to 2012. A seminal work is identified, citation network analysis is applied and a framework model is developed.

The author reports on how terms are defIned:

Psychologists define CSA as contact between a child and an adult or other per- son significantly older or in a position of power or control over the child in which the child is being used for sexual gratification for the adult or other.

The law defines CSA as a criminal and civil offence in which an adult engages in sexual activity with a minor or exploits a minor for the purpose of sexual gratification.

The term media applies to CSA news stories appearing in newspapers, maga- zines, tabloid newspapers and television news reports. Media advocacy is the strategic use of the media to encourage social and public policy changes.

The methodology Is descrIBed:

A search was performed through EBSCO, JSTOR, MEDLINE, Google Scholar, Google and the Web of Social Sciences for English-language articles that

(a) included ‘child sexual abuse’ and ‘media’ in the title, abstract or keywords;

(b) focused its research on CSA and the media; and (c) used qualitative, quantitative or both methods to collect or analyse data about CSA and the media. Research across disciplines and geographic boundaries was included; however, research papers that did not utilize qualitative or quantitative methods and articles from non- peer-reviewed sources (e. g. mainstream media) were excluded.

report by Gray and Watt (2013) for the Metropolitan Police and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) into sexual allegations made against Jimmy Savile. Academic publications and scholarly work encompassed the work of Daly (2014) and Stanley (2016) on institutional abuse and work from out- side of the discipline of criminology that contributes to knowledge, for example social psychology and child and family social work.

My gathering together of literature was largely unrestricted in terms of the rules I adopted. In this respect, it was very different from the systematic review example provided in Box 12. 2. My research questions were such that I was exploring an avenue of inquiry that presupposed there would be a diffuse effect of victimization emanating from child sexual abuse. I wanted to keep the parameters of my sources as open as possible and was reluctant to close off any potentially useful directions that I might be guided towards. In this sense, even my initial trawl of the literature was ‘grounded’ in nature and has leanings towards an inductive rather than deduc- tive approach to analysis. This initial search produced a bibliography that was typically eclectic in nature. ‘Typically’ because in the early stages of most inductive criminological research, the reference list produced in support of your inquiry will be relatively unfocused, limited only perhaps by time periods, crime types and other fairly loose inclusion/exclusion criteria.

This initial analysis of official and grey literatures ensured that I familiarized myself with the language, protocols, provisions and personnel involved in supporting children and their families affected by child sexual abuse, and grasp the nature and focus of the debates that academic colleagues were foregrounding as well as the issues that faded into the background. My analysis involved returning to these pub- lications, incorporating new literatures amassed during the course of the research and interrogating them to determine whether or not any of them made sense of what I had uncovered in my findings from the in-depth interviews. This part of my analy- sis also involved a more rigorous scrutiny of the provenance of the resources and a thematic review. This re-use and interrogation of the literature involved using both established and new concepts and conceptual themes as emergent from the interview data.