Document analysis: How to make sense of legal and authoritative texts

Social scientists have shown limited interest in documents in their research on institutions, particularly the criminal justice system, which is surprising considering the omnipresence of documents in legal institutions. This article outlines an approach to conducting document analysis, with a particular focus on legal documents. It builds on existing methods but offers unique analytical strategies for researching authoritative texts. The purpose of this article is to inspire and facilitate more research with legal documents. Based on my research on sexual violence, I propose a step-by-step methodological approach to documents in general and a set of analytical strategies to interpret legal documents in particular. The aim is to sketch out a framework that encourages the researcher to reflect on various aspects of documents and to illustrate how to conduct document analysis.