Research Methods & Encyclopedias in Social Sciences

A-Z of Digital Research Methods provides a pathway through the often-confusing digital research landscape, while also addressing theoretical, ethical and legal issues that may accompany each methodology. Dawson outlines 60 chapters on a wide range of qualitative and quantitative digital research methods, including textual, numerical, geographical and audio-visual methods.

This volume seeks to address the emerging relationships between qualitative research and digital data. At the present time, ubiquitous digital data is altering the foci of research, the contexts in which research takes place, and the methods and tools available for qualitative research. Alongside new challenges and opportunities, there are many ways in which established qualitative methods are being used to situate and interpret digital phenomena.

This book explores the potentials of qualitative methods and analysis for big data, including text mining, sentiment analysis, information and data visualization, netnography, follow-the-thing methods, mobile research methods, multimodal analysis, and rhythmanalysis.

The volume lends a critical focus on discursive practices operating through the paradigm of social media communication, arguing that the critical discourse social media research must go beyond the notion of the simple analysis of social media data. The volume features chapters highlighting a diverse range of methods, including multi-sited ethnography, multimodality, argumentation, and topic modelling, as applied to a global range of case studies to present a holistic portrait of the latest methodological and theoretical debates in this space.

Doing Research In and On the Digital aims to deliver on two fronts: first, by detailing how researchers are devising and applying innovative research methods for and within the digital sphere, and, secondly, by discussing the ethical challenges and issues implied and encountered in such approaches.

This volume explores major debates, introduces digital trace data, reviews the changing survey landscape, and presents novel examples of computational social science research on sensing social interaction, social robots, bots, sentiment, manipulation, and extremism in social media.

Exploring the social implications of digital transformation, as well as demonstrating how we might use digital transformation to further sociological knowledge, this incisive Handbook provides an extensive overview of cutting-edge research on the digital turn of modern society.

Researching Everyday Childhoods begins by asking what recent ‘post-empirical’ and ‘post-digital’ frameworks can offer researchers of children and young people’s lives, particularly in researching and theorising how the digital remakes childhood and youth. The key ideas of time, technology and documentation are then introduced and are woven throughout the book’s chapters.

Digital work is organizationally, interpretively, spatially, and temporally complex. An array of innovative methodologies have begun to emerge to capture these activities, whether through re-purposing existing tools, devising entirely novel methods, or mixing old and new. This book brings together some of these techniques in one volume as a sourcebook for management, business, organizational and work researchers pursuing projects in this field.

“Social Simulation for a Digital Society” provides a cross-section of state-of-the-art research in social simulation and computational social science. With the availability of big data and faster computing power, the social sciences are undergoing a tremendous transformation.

Online research methods are popular, dynamic and fast-changing. Following on from the great success of the first edition, published in 2008, The SAGE Handbook of Online Research Methods, Second Edition offers both updates of existing subject areas and new chapters covering more recent developments, such as social media, big data, data visualization and CAQDAS.

The more quantified datasets we have, the more difficult it is to interpret them without adding layers of qualitative interpretation. Big Data needs Thick Data. This book presents the available arsenal of new tools for studying the society quantitatively, but also show the new methods of analysis from the qualitative side and encourages their combination.

This is a guide to understanding digital research from both a conceptual and practical perspective, helping the reader to make sense of the issues, challenges, and opportunities of social science research in the digital age.