Qualitative Research: An Introduction to Methods and Designs

The How: The Evidence Behind Historical Research

When trying to understand the past—whether it is individuals or groups, policies or people, or ideas or innovators—historians rely on evidence to determine what they know about the past. In understanding the evidence or sources behind historical research, we see the most similarity between the historian and the detective. Unlike other researchers, such as in the sciences or other social sciences in which scholars run experiments, administer surveys, or otherwise create data, historians dig for it. They are detectives on a search in a relatively great unknown. Historians typically find data or sources in old documents. Sometimes they use quantifiable data (census records, for instance) and run statistical ...