Last Updated on October 12, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Personal documents are documents written for oneself or for close friends and family, and not usually for a wider public. In brief:
- The two main types of personal document for A-level sociology are diaries and personal letters. Private emails and messages, and some personal blogs and vlogs, can also count.
- The most famous study using personal documents is Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920), based on letters between Polish migrants and their families.
- Their main strengths are that they give insight into people’s meanings in their own words, they weren’t produced for the researcher, and they may be the only way of studying the past.
- Their main limitations are problems of interpretation, authenticity, credibility and representativeness, the time they take to analyse, and ethical issues of consent and privacy.
Personal documents are a type of secondary qualitative data, and part of the research methods topic in AQA A-level sociology. They come up mainly in the theory and methods section of Paper 3, and also on Paper 1.
What are personal documents?
Personal documents are documents intended to be seen only by oneself or by close friends and family. They are generally, but not always, not intended for a wider public audience.
For A-level sociology, the two main types of personal document are diaries and personal letters.
Today, I’m inclined to include personal emails and intimate group chats, such as a WhatsApp group of close friends, as personal documents. They reveal people’s personal thoughts and feelings and aren’t intended for public consumption.
I would also include some personal blogs and vlogs, even though they are public, because they reveal the author’s personal thoughts and feelings. Examples include people sharing their daily lives on YouTube, travel blogs, and blogs written by people coping with a critical illness.
I’m leaving “naughty photos” intended only for an intimate partner out of this post!
Types of personal document
| Type | Who it is written for | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Diaries | The writer | The clearest example of a personal document |
| Personal letters | Close friends and family | The basis of The Polish Peasant |
| Private emails and messages | Close friends and family | The modern equivalent of letters |
| Personal blogs and vlogs | A wider public | Personal but not private |
| Autobiographies | A wider public | Personal but written for publication; see autobiographies in social research |
Personal documents and private documents
Just a quick note on definitions. Some textbooks distinguish between personal and private documents:
- Personal documents are anything which reveals someone’s personal thoughts and feelings. They may be written for oneself, for close others, or sometimes for the public.
- Private documents are documents not intended for a wider public audience. These include diaries and intimate letters between two people, but also things like company accounts or business strategy documents, even if several dozen people see them.
The two categories overlap, so be clear which definition you are using. For exam purposes, diaries and intimate letters are certainly personal documents, so they are the safest examples to use.
Examples of sociological research using personal documents
Thomas and Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920)
W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s study is the classic example of sociological research using personal documents. It was published in five volumes between 1918 and 1920.
The study used both personal and public documents. The personal documents included letters exchanged between Polish migrants and their families, from around fifty families, and the life history of one Polish migrant, Wladek Wiszniewski. The public documents included letters to newspapers, parish records and court records.
The study focuses on the cultural consequences of Polish migration to America. Themes in the documents include crime, prostitution, alcoholism and the problem of social happiness in general.
Theoretically, the study was significant because it put the individual, and the meanings people gave to their own experiences, at the centre of social analysis. That was in contrast to the positivist approach popular at the time.
Mass Observation
The Mass Observation project, founded in Britain in 1937, asked ordinary people to keep diaries and write about their everyday lives. Its diaries from the Second World War are a well-known record of how people experienced the war at home. The project was revived in 1981 and still asks volunteers to write about their lives, and its archive is held at the University of Sussex.
Strengths of using personal documents in social research
Insight into meanings. Personal documents give a direct view of people’s thoughts, feelings and motives, in their own words. This is why interpretivists value them: they offer the kind of in-depth, valid data that helps the researcher achieve Verstehen.
They weren’t produced for the researcher. A diary or letter is written for the writer’s own reasons, not to answer a researcher’s questions. So there is no interviewer bias, and the writer isn’t changing what they say because they know a sociologist is reading.
They may be the only way of studying the past. The people who wrote The Polish Peasant letters can’t be interviewed. Their letters are the only record of how they experienced migration.
They can show change over time. A diary kept over months or years shows how someone’s views and experiences developed, which a one-off interview can’t.
They are usually cheap to access, especially once collected into an archive.
The limitations of using personal documents in social research
Problems of interpretation. The researcher may misread the meaning of a document. The less contextual information there is about who wrote it, when and why, the more likely this is.
Authenticity. The researcher may not be able to verify who wrote a document, or whether parts are missing.
Credibility. People don’t always tell the truth, even in a diary. Some diaries are written with an eye on later publication, and letters are written to create an impression on the reader, such as reassuring a worried parent.
Representativeness. The people who keep diaries and write long letters are not typical of the population. Historically they were more likely to be literate and educated, and many documents don’t survive at all. Findings from personal documents are hard to generalise.
Time. It takes a long time to sift through and organise the material, especially in a study the size of The Polish Peasant.
Ethics. Personal documents were written to be private. Using them raises questions of consent and privacy, especially for recent documents such as emails and messages whose authors are still alive.
And finally, who cares? Is anyone really going to read five volumes of letters from Polish migrants written more than a hundred years ago?
These criteria (authenticity, credibility, representativeness and meaning) come from John Scott’s (1990) framework for assessing documents. See the strengths and limitations of secondary data for the full framework.
Autobiographies
An autobiography is an account of someone’s life written by that person, sometimes with the help of a professional writer (a ghostwriter). Autobiographies are personal documents in that they reveal the author’s own thoughts and feelings, but unlike diaries and letters they are written to be published and sold.
That makes them a weak source of data about people’s lives:
- They are selective. The author chooses what to reveal and what to leave out.
- They can’t be verified. Readers have no way of checking whether events happened as described, or whether what the author presents as most important really was.
- They are shaped for an audience. Authors may exaggerate or misremember events, or present them in whatever way will sell best. Some events may be invented altogether.
In my view, the more famous the author, the less valid the content, because celebrities have a public image to protect. If you think about how honest you’d be in an autobiography that anyone could read, you’ll see the problem!
Autobiography sales data may be more useful
If autobiographies tell us what people want to hear rather than the truth about people’s lives, then the most sociologically useful thing about them may be which ones sell. Sales figures tell us something about public tastes and about which kinds of life story people want to read.
Strengths and limitations of personal documents: summary table
| Strengths | Limitations | |
|---|---|---|
| Theoretical | High validity: people’s meanings in their own words; not produced for the researcher, so no interviewer bias; show change over time; preferred by interpretivists | Hard to interpret without context; may lack authenticity and credibility; unrepresentative; hard to generalise from |
| Practical | May be the only source on the past; usually cheap once archived | Time-consuming to sift and organise; documents may not survive or be available |
| Ethical | No direct contact with participants | Written to be private, so consent and privacy issues, especially for recent documents |
Relevance to A-level sociology
Personal documents are part of the secondary data section of the research methods topic. They usually come up in a 10-mark question on the advantages or disadvantages of using documents, or as evaluation in an essay on qualitative methods. In a 10-mark question, name the type of document (a diary, a letter) rather than writing about “documents” in general.
For a worked example, see two practical problems of using documents in social research (10).
Theory and Methods revision bundle
If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my Theory and Methods revision bundle, which contains the following:
Signposting and related posts
This post has been written primarily for students studying the research methods topic, as part of the AQA’s A-Level Sociology course.
Personal documents are one type of secondary qualitative data. For secondary data in general, see the strengths and limitations of secondary data, and for another type of personal document, see autobiographies in social research.
For why interpretivists value this kind of data, see qualitative data: strengths and limitations.
For more detailed posts on research methods, please see my page on research methods.
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