Digital methods for social science: an interdisciplinary guide to research innovation

Citation

Manžuch, Z. (2017), "Digital methods for social science: an interdisciplinary guide to research innovation", The Electronic Library, Vol. 35 No. 4, pp. 839-840. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-05-2017-0106

Digital media provide tools and space for the social interaction that has increasingly become part of our lives. They also become a promise and a challenge for social scientists interested in extending their research of social phenomena into digital space. Social media platforms produce vast data collections that can be used for a wide spectrum of social research. However, an understanding of digital tools, new competencies for collecting and interpreting digital data and also awareness of ethical challenges are necessary to apply them in practice. Digital data collection and analysis tools are embedded in commercial social media platforms that influence how data are accessed and interpreted. Social media enterprises become powerful players in the digital research arena.

Opportunities, challenges and contexts of using digital technologies and especially social media platforms in social research are discussed in this collection of papers. Written by an impressive number of contributors (26!), whose fields of competence include psychology, education, anthropology, business, digital media, computer science and sociology, the book is an attractive reading choice. It gives us the authentic research experiences of contributors so the reader can be aware of the advantages and drawbacks of such organisation of material. On the one hand, it helps to get an in-depth understanding of research issues faced by the contributors; on the other, it limits discussion to specific experiences, tools and sources. The editors have tried to overcome this fragmentation by thoughtful organisation of contributions and introductions that summarise the main themes and lessons.

The book consists of four parts. The first part “Big Data, Thick Data: Social Media Analysis” provides an introduction to accessing, processing and interpreting social media data in social research. The second part “Combining and Comparing methods” invites the reader to align traditional and digital approaches to social research. It also emphasises the need to combine traditional and digital methods to study our increasingly mixed physical and digital lives. The third part “Developing Innovations in Digital Methods” elaborates on applying traditional social methods in new digital settings and finding new research objects, whereas the fourth part “Digital Research: Challenges and Contentions” makes the reader cautious about ethical issues of data confidentiality, the nature of digital data, the inequalities and power relations they reflect, the limitations of digital methods for studying social phenomena and so on. To summarise: the book encourages a more mature and thoughtful approach to digital methods, but it is not a step-by-step guide for the application of methods; those wishing to find advice on particular techniques will need to turn to other sources.