Social Research in a Digital Age

Course goals

At the end of the course,

• The student is familiar with various research strategies that rely on the internet and digital trace data;
• The student has hands- on experience with some of these research strategies;
• The student is able to evaluate the usefulness and applicability of such research strategies to specific research- or policy problems in terms of validity, reliability, feasibility and ethics;
• The student is able to critically evaluate results from such research strategies as applied to specific research- or policy problems;

Content

The internet plays an increasingly important role in modern societies. More and more, social interaction, between individual people, but also between consumers and producers, and citizens and the government, takes place online. These developments imply many new sociological and societal questions, but also provide unprecedented opportunities for new research, new policies, and policy-oriented research. For example, we can now study social networks at the scale of entire societies using social media data, we track people's geographic mobility using their smartphones' GPS chips, or study large-scale consumer behavior on online markets.
 
At the same time, these new research opportunities come with challenges that are often poorly understood, by social scientists, data scientists, as well as policy makers. For instance, some of the most valuable data sources, such as social media data, are in practice not accessible to social scientists, as they are the property of private companies, or because legal or ethical restrictions forbid their collection. When "big data" are available, they are often biased and polluted by algorithms or other sources.

This course takes a realistic approach to social science research in the digital age by introducing students to research strategies that, on the one hand, make use of the many research opportunities that the internet has to offer, but on the other hand, are usable and responsible, take the many pitfalls of digital trace data into account, and allow for research that is independent of "big tech" as much as possible. In the process, we introduce students to a number of hands-on techniques for collection of digital trace data such as collecting social media data and scraping. As such, the course aims to be useful to applied researchers as well as policy makers confronted with the need to make data-driven decisions in an increasingly datafied world. 
 
Throughout the course, we will consistently discuss research strategies in connection with substantive sociological and policy-relevant problems, such as the spread of fake news or social cohesion (TBD).