4.4.1　Documents

Documents are ready-made data sources to explore to what extent social settings self-document their institutional cultures and ideologies (Merriam, 2009; Atkinson & Coffey, 2011).Documents employed in the qualitative case study can be public records (e.g., official announcements, administrative documents, policy planning), personal documents (e.g., diaries, notes, narratives), or visual documents (e.g., webpages, photographs, films, videos).It is possible that documents are not neutral or transparent representations of institutional life and unavoidably generate unique limitations and strengths; yet, they are important documentary data to understand how institutions work and how people work within them (Atkinson & Coffey, 2011).

Limitations inherent in public documentary data are retrievability, biased selectivity, reporting bias and access (Yin, 2014).First, data collection may be carried out at a researcher’s convenience because of the difficulty of systematic reviews and searches for relevant documents.This to some extent implies the researcher’s uncertainty in choosing potential documents from overabundant materials.Second, documentary data may be incomplete for the research owing to its non-research-oriented purposes.In consequence, biased selection may stem from the unrepresentative samples of public records or personal documents.Third, reporting bias contains implicit or explicit bias of certain writers.Documentary materials are purported to produce either objective or subjective deception:these ‘built-in biases’ (Merriam, 2009, p.125) thus raise a qualitative researcher’s awareness to determine their authenticity and accuracy in reporting.Fourth, the access to documentary data may be conducted without clear research purposes.For example, aimless search of abundant materials on the Internet may result in this problem.To avoid such impertinent data access, a researcher suggests ‘to sort or triage the materials (documents or numeric data) by their apparent centrality to your inquiry’ (Yin, 2014, p.109).Notwithstanding, Yin (2014) summarises four strengths of document data:it is stable (can be reviewed repeatedly), unobtrusive (not created as a result of the case study), specific (can contain the exact names, references, and details of an event), and broad (can cover a long span of time, many events, and many settings).

In this study, using documents as one complementary type of data research helps accumulate rich information about the physical and semiotic context.The public documents, including the University Strategic Plan 2010—2015, Global Strategy 2020, and module curricula, were ongoing and continuing records (Merriam, 2009) that were available from the research university’s official website through the Internet, and an intranet which was limited to the insiders of the university.They were good and authentic data resources to stably track the historical existence of the context, and the social practices, conventions and ideology of the university and of the discipline.These documentary evidences became social facts enabling this study to present the reality of the context and its attached cultural and ideological values.Furthermore, the student personal recounts were a reliable data source of ‘first-person narrative that describes an individual’s actions, experiences, and beliefs’ (Bogdan & Biklen, 1992, p.132), which usefully laid out a basic understanding of the participants’ dynamic disciplinary experiences and a complexity of disciplinary identities construction in the context.Therefore, six student personal recounts were purposefully collected from six Chinese student participants before the semi-structured interviews, to particularly explore the potential teaching and learning challenges they faced with, as well as their corresponding attitudinal evaluation.