A document corpus is assembled after the fact rather than collected in the moment, and nothing vouches for a document's place in it the way an interviewer vouches for who said what in a transcript. John Scott's four-criterion appraisal grid for documentary sources is built for exactly that gap: authenticity, credibility, representativeness and meaning, asked of every document before its content counts as data. Three of the four can exclude a document outright. The fourth, meaning, never does; it is interpreted rather than adjudicated, a distinction most coding guides skip past.
The pack is three documents and three sheets. Sampling Rationale and Coding Frame fix the document universe and the five codes before a single document is appraised. Document Register holds the appraisal, two dates per document rather than one, and the disposition with its reason. Coded Extract Register holds the verbatim excerpts behind every coded passage, and Frequency by Source Type compares how often each code appears across genres instead of pooling them into one count that would hide the gap between them.
The worked example is one health department's communications during a foodborne-illness investigation: eighteen documents assembled, fifteen appraised into the coded corpus. A press release's stated detection date is the date the department went public, seven days after its own internal record shows the cluster was first suspected. A FAQ page reverses a factual claim between two of its own capture dates, with nothing on the page marking that anything changed. Open the pack in River and the agent appraises alongside you, or download the sheets and run your own corpus through the same register.
Qualitative Document Analysis Template