Quantitative Research Methods

1. Quantitative Research Methods ‘Modelling data’: from source to essay

2. Data Modelling • Historical source material offers much potential for analysis but also many challenges… • Unstructured source material • Missing data • Complications with numbers and dates • Data comes from more than one source

3. Some sources translate easilyinto a database for further analysis Unique identifier or primary key Row or record Column or field or attribute Field name or attribute name Nineteenth-century Yorkshire poll book

4. But what do you do with this? Probate Inventory, Staffordshire (1573)

5. Don’t panic! This is where data modelling or source analysis comes in. • Data should be broken down into components that collects groups of information into objects or events. • For example information relating to a person, an organisation, a document, an object or a building, or to events such as a marriage, a transaction, the making of a will, or an election. • In database terminology these are referred to as entities. • Each entity will form a table in the final database.

6. Once you have your main components, then you can start creating your tables for further analysis • Once each entity has been identified, list the data associated with each. • For example, there may be information on the first name, surname, address, age, sex and occupation of each person in a table relating to individuals. • This information will produce the fields (or columns) for each table. • The fields are also known as attributes.

7. A simple table (this could be analysed using Excel) Unique identifier or primary key Row or record Column or field or attribute Field name or attribute name

8. Or something more complex (use Access to analyse these tables) Offences Table Defendant ID Case Number Offence Type Place of Offence Date of Offence Description Comments Defendant Table Defendant ID First name Surname Address Age Sex Occupation Title Comments Sentence Table Defendant ID Case Number Verdict Sentence Comments Witnesses Table Case Number Witness 1 First name Witness 1 Surname Witness 1 Address Witness 1 Sex Witness 2 First name Witness 2 Surname Witness 2 Address Witness 2 Sex Comments Occupational Categorisation Table Occupation Title Occupational Categorisation 1 Occupational Categorisation 2

9. Probate inventories Gun culture Wealth Material culture Patterns of consumption Evolution of buildings and housing The history of private life Book ownership and literacy Occupations Farming and agriculture The domestic interior The world of goods Credit and debt Slaves and servants

10. A simple probate inventory table Wilmington, Delaware probate inventories (Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries)

11. A more complex structure From Margot Finn’s ‘Consumption in British India’ project

12. What determines the structure of your final table(s)? • Questions you want to answer (thus if you are only interested in gun ownership you might omit other details from inventories) • Information in the source • Extra information that may enrich the source material (categorisations of material, links to other documents) • Size of tables – are you happy working with one very big table or a series of smaller ones?

13. From Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660-1760 (London: Routledge,1988)