Abstract
Internet as place of everyday life, as well as a vast repository of information, becomes an integral part of the society essential for understanding complex phenomena and social issues. Social researchers cannot remain anchored to traditional research practices and conceptual categories, but instead must cope with the exponential growth of new data, much of which is user-generated and freely available online. In this manner, Web-mediated research is already transforming the way in which researchers practice traditional research methods transposed on the Web. But the steady growth of interest in these new analytical frontiers has not been properly accompanied by a solid reflection on the implications that the new data available and the analysis of such data can generate. It is necessary to undertake a critical discussion of the quality of this new data and the processes involved: data collection, organization, analysis, and treatment of ethical issues. Over the next years, this domain will raise the need of to much efforts in social research including the use of new methodological approaches. Along this track, the current chapter aims to problematize future challenges for social research, with a particular emphasis on the advent of big-new data.
References
Addeo, F., & Esposito, M. (2015). Informal learning and ldentity formation: A case study of an Italian virtual community.
Agrawal, R., & Srikant, R. (2000, May). Privacy-preserving data mining. ACM Sigmod Record, 29(2), 439–450.
Amaturo, E., & Aragona, B. (2016). La “rivoluzione” dei nuovi dati: quale metodo per il futuro, quale futuro per il metodo?. In F. Corbisiero and E. Ruspini (Eds.), Sociologia del futuro. Studiare la società del ventunesimo secolo (pp. 25–50). Milano: CEDAM.
Amaturo, E., & Punziano, G. (2016). I Mixed Methods nella ricerca sociale. Roma: Carocci Editore.
Amaturo, E., & Punziano, G. (2013). Content Analysis: tra comunicazione e politica. Milano: Ledizioni.
Andrews, D., Nonnecke, B., & Preece, J. (2003). Electronic survey methodology: A case study in reaching hard-to-involve Internet users. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 16, 185–210.
Boccia Artieri, G. (2015). Gli effetti sociali del web. Franco Angeli: Forme della comunicazione e metodologie della ricerca on-line. Milano.
Bryman, A. (2004). Social research methods (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chen, H., Chiang, R. H., & Storey, V. C. (2012). Business Intelligence And Analytics: From big data to big impact. MIS Quarterly, 36(4), 1165–1188.
Cresswell, J. W. (2003). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative and mixed method approaches. London: Sage.
Daigneault, P. M., & Jacob, S. (2014). Unexpected but most welcome mixed methods for the validation and revision of the participatory evaluation measurement instrument. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 8(1), 6–24.
Davenport, T. H., Barth, P., & Bean, R. (2012). How big data is different. MIT Sloan Management Review, 54(1), 43.
Davis, M., Bolding, G., Hart, G., Sherr, L., & Elford, J. (2004). Reflecting on the experience of interviewing online: Perspectives from the Internet and HIV study in London. AIDS Care, 16, 944–952.
Denissen, J. J. A., Neumann, L., & van Zalk, M. (2010). How the Internet is changing the implementation of traditional research methods, people’s daily lives, and the way in which developmental scientists conduct research. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 34, 564–575.
Denzin, N. K. (1978). The research act. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Dicks, B., & Mason, B. (2008). Hypermedia methods for qualitative research. In S. N. Hesse-Biber & P. Leavy (Eds.), Handbook of emergent methods (pp. 571–600). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Doan, A., Ramakrishnan, R., & Halevy, A. Y. (2011). Crowdsourcing systems on the world-wide web. Communications of the ACM, 54(4), 86–96.
Dumbill, E. (2013). Making sense of big data. Big Data, 1(1), 1–2.
Ehrlich, K., Lin, C. Y., & Griffiths-Fisher, V. (2007). Searching for experts in the enterprise: combining text and social network analysis. In Proceedings of the 2007 International ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work (pp. 117–126).
Elias, P. (2012). Big data and the social sciences: a perspective from the ESRC, presentation at the conference Shaping society.
Gantz, J., & Reinsel, D. (2012). The digital universe in 2020: big data, bigger digital shadows, and biggest growth in the far east (pp. 1–16). IDC iView: IDC Analyze the future.
Gibson, R. (2010). Web content analysis. Manchester: University of Manchester Press.
Herring, S. C. (2004). Computer-mediated discourse analysis: An approach to researching online behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hesse-Biber, S. N., & Griffin, A. J. (2013). Internet-mediated technologies and mixed methods research problems and prospects. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 7(1), 43–61.
Hesse-Biber, S. N., & Johnson, R. B. (2013). Coming at things differently future directions of possible engagement with mixed methods research. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 7(2), 103–109.
Hewson, C. (2003). Conducting research on the Internet. The Psychologist, 16, 290–293.
Hewson, C. (2007). Web-MCQ: A set of methods and freely available open source code for administering online multiple choice question assessments. Behavior Research Methods, 39, 471–481.
Hewson, C. (2008). Internet-mediated research as an emergent method and its potential role in facilitating mixed methods research. In S. N. Hesse-Biber and P. Leavy (Eds.). Handbook of emergent methods (pp. 543–570). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Hine, C. (2008). Internet research as emergent practice. In S. N. Hesse-Biber & P. Leavy (Eds.), Handbook of emergent methods (pp. 525–541). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Internet World Statistics (2015). Internet users and population stats for the Americas.
James, N., & Busher, H. (2009). Online interviewing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Johnson, R. B., Onwuegbuzie, A. J., & Turner, L. A. (2007). Towards a definition of mixed methods research. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 1(2), 112–133.
Kitchin, R. (2014). The data revolution: Big data, open data, data infrastructures and their consequences. London: Sage.
Kozinets, R. V. (2010). Netnography: Doing ethnographic research online. London: Sage Publications.
Labrinidis, A., & Jagadish, H. V. (2012). Challenges and opportunities with big data. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 5(12), 2032–2033.
Lilleker, D., & Jackson, N. (2011). Campaigning. Elections and the Internet: US, UK, Germany and France. London: Routledge.
Lohr, S. (2012). The age of big data. New York Times, 11.
Madden, S. (2012). From databases to big data. IEEE Internet Computing, 3, 4–6.
Madge, C., & O’Connor, H. (2002). Online with e-mums: Exploring the Internet as a medium for research. Area, 34, 92–102.
McAfee, A., Brynjolfsson, E., Davenport, T. H., Patil, D. J., & Barton, D. (2012). Big data. The management revolution. Harvard Bus Rev, 90(10), 61–67.
McLuhan, M. (1964, tr.it. 1994). Understanding media: The extensions of man. Cambridge: MIT Press.
McMillan, J. H. (2001). Essential assessment concepts for teachers and administrators. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Publishing Company.
Meyrowitz, J. (1994). Medium theory. In D. Crowley & D. Mitchell (Eds.), Communication theory today (pp. 50–77). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Mitra, A., & Cohen, E. (1999). Analyzing the web: Directions and challenges. In S. Jones (a cura di). Doing internet research. London: Sage. 179-202-220.
O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0? Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software.
Pang, B., & Lee, L. (2008). Opinion mining and sentiment analysis. Foundations and trends in information retrieval, 2(1–2), 1–135.
Punziano, G. (2016). Il futuro dell’approccio: vantaggi, limiti e nuove prospettive. In E. Amaturo & G. Punziano (Eds.), I Mixed Methods nella ricerca sociale. Roma: Carocci Editore.
Robinson, L., & Schulz, J. (2011). New fieldsites, new methods: New ethnographic opportunities. In S. N. Hesse-Biber (Ed.), The handbook of emergent technologies in social research (pp. 180–198). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Scott, J. (2012). Social network analysis. London: Sage.
Steinfield, C., Ellison, N. B., & Lampe, C. (2008). Social capital, self-esteem, and use of online social network sites: A longitudinal analysis. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 29(6), 434–445.
Tashakkori, A., & Teddlie, C. (2010). Handbook of mixed methods in social and behavioral research. London: Sage.
Van Dijck, J. (2009). Users like you? Theorizing agency in user-generated content. Media, Culture and Society, 31(1), 41.
Wakeford, N. (2000). New media, new methodologies: Studying the web. In D. Gauntlett (a cura di). Web.studies: Rewiring media studies for the digital age (pp. 31–42). London: Arnold.
Wasserman, S., & Faust, K. (1994). Social network analysis. Methods and applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Amaturo, E., Punziano, G. (2017). Blurry Boundaries: Internet, Big-New Data, and Mixed-Method Approach. In: Lauro, N., Amaturo, E., Grassia, M., Aragona, B., Marino, M. (eds) Data Science and Social Research. Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55477-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55477-8_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-55476-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-55477-8
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)