Incorporating Public Records Requests into Social Movements Research: Potential Applications in Mixed Methods Studies

• In Event: 363 - Regular Session. Methods, Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative

Abstract

Sociologists rarely use freedom of information requests (FOIR) for data collection in sociological research, despite a variety of potential applications. FOIR refers to the process of obtaining government data through the use of public records requests. This paper illustrates an integration of quantitative and qualitative applications of FOIR to better understand the occurrence, context, and monitoring of protests in a city. First, I collected documents via FOIR from the Seattle Police Department to analyze the occurrence of protests in Seattle. I compared the police record of protests to coverage of collective action in the Seattle Times to (1) create a more complete picture of protest occurrence in Seattle, and (2) evaluate the biases in each data source. The newspaper and police department covered only overlapped on 21 percent of protest events, while both sources contributed a roughly equal number of unique events to the final count. The results show that police were more likely to consistently “cover” Black Lives Matter protests than the newspaper. Internal police documents also revealed unique accounts of protester tactics and policing strategies, which may be useful in constructing well-rounded descriptions of events. The integration of quantitative and qualitative details from FOIR data has an opportunity to contribute to a fuller sociological understanding of protest activity.

Author

• Pierce Greenberg, Washington State University