Archival Records

Description

Archival records are paper documents or computer files preserved by organizations and institutions as evidence of events that are important to that organization or institution. For example, records of office discipline referrals are stored by schools, along with records of attendance, grades, and academic test scores. Other examples of archival records include (a) arrest and incarceration records kept by the police; (b) medical records kept by doctors, dentists, pharmacies, clinics, and hospitals; (c) vital statistics of births and deaths kept by county governments; and (d) marriage records kept by churches and governments. Families, businesses, departments of motor vehicles, historians, and the public in general find value in maintaining records.

Institutional records are kept because they contain information about events that are important in and of themselves. For example, being arrested and being referred to the principal's office are important events for everyone involved or affected (e.g., offender and offender's family and friends, authority and persons responsible for documentation, observers and bystanders, taxpayers).

In any society, questions arise about crime, school discipline, hospitalizations, and other events that can be answered by a study of institutional records. Analysis of relevant archival data may be the most practical and efficient way to find answers to research questions. Institutional records are well suited for studies covering long periods of time, covering many areas of the country, or involving large sample populations. [Page 1144]In addition, regularly scheduled reviews of internal data greatly facilitate formative evaluation and ongoing monitoring of important events within an institution.

School archival records are particularly important in relation to behavior management because school staff produce records of serious behavior problems. These records are a valuable source of information about the way a school serves students. Prevention efforts, behavioral interventions, special education, and counseling services typically are documented, as well as outcomes for the student, such as academic achievement, suspensions, expulsion, dropout, or high school graduation. Other types of information typically found in school archives include attendance, school transfers and placements, psychologists' evaluations, reports of suspected abuse or neglect, records of accidents or injuries in nurses' logs, and documentation of functional behavioral assessments.

Research

Archival records are valuable sources of research data for at least three reasons: (1) the events were documented because they are important; (2) long periods of time and many people can be studied relatively quickly, unobtrusively, and inexpensively; and (3) although they may be a challenge to analyze, the researcher who demonstrates a difference using data from institutional records can be fairly confident that the difference is real and that it is important to everyone who is in any way involved with, or affected by, the institution.

Institutional records are routinely compiled and provide a readily available source of data for research. Because the records preserve what was written at the time of the incident, problems associated with interview or questionnaire data, such as selective memory and bias, are avoided. Another advantage of archival data is that the data collection is not intrusive, and subject reactivity is seldom a problem. To enhance interpretation of archival data, researchers can use additional sources of information, such as direct observation, surveys, and interviews. Records from schools, correctional facilities, and medical clinics have been used in various studies in combination with self-reported data from interviews or questionnaires about (respectively) students' behavior problems in school, adolescents' illegal activities, and teen pregnancies and sexual practices. Research findings indicate that although the frequency of problem behaviors as indicated in official records typically is lower than self-reported frequency, for both sources, changes over time and correlations with other variables will be similar. In other words, not everything that happens is recorded, but what is recorded tends to reflect what is happening. In general, archival data provide a conservative estimate of the frequency of individual behaviors of interest.

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