Understanding Research in the Digital Age

Sarah Quinton,Nina Reynolds

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526448316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: F&D

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.

The book will help the reader to understand how the digital context impacts on social science research and is divided into three main sections:

• A Justification & Reconceptualization of Digital Research: The authors explore how far the digital environment is transforming social science research.
• Accessing Digital Data: An outline of the characteristics of digital data, temporality issues in digital research and different data sources.
• Moving Forward with Digital Research: Examining the practicalities of how to conduct digital research, with examples and suggestions to strengthen the implementation of digital research.

Suitable for Masters and Doctoral students undertaking digital or online research methods courses, as well as anyone doing a research project or dissertation with an online component.

Part 1 A Justification and Reconceptualisation of Digital Research

In this part we consider how social science research in the digital age can be conceptualised. We look at both the macro-level conceptualisation of digital research, as well as micro-level issues for individual research projects. In Chapter 1 we identify the importance of recognising that the digital environment impacts on social science phenomena, presenting us with opportunities for research, as well as providing a method or instrument through which research can be undertaken. This chapter also discusses how digital phenomena and/or methods can productively be combined with more established methods and/or known phenomena to produce new insights. Finally in Chapter 1, we outline some of the broad issues for digital researchers to consider and outline the structure of the book.

Chapter 2 takes a narrower perspective, focusing on the impact of the digital environment on research and the research projects we undertake. It starts by considering how working in the digital context may need to change the heuristics we use to think about research. The dynamic nature of the digital environment requires us to contextualise our research within the socio-technological context. We present some questions that will help digital researchers consider both how their research is broadly contextualised, as well as how their research design might need to consider socio-cultural and technological factors.

1 Digital Research as a Phenomenon and a Method

In this chapter we will:

• identify what is digital research
• explain why it matters
• outline the structure of the book.

Introduction and Scope

As researchers, we can take an optimistic and open, or pessimistic and closed, stance on the use and application of digital technologies for research (Marres, 2012). We can choose to see new technologies as opening up new possibilities of discovery or we can choose to see research and the development of insight as being endangered by a technological shift over which researchers are powerless; a new world where human involvement is lost and research is conducted, analysed and results implemented by ‘smart’ connected technology. Whichever perspective you hold, or perhaps you are agnostic in your views, this text aims to clarify understanding of digital research across the social sciences to inform post-graduate, doctoral and post-doctoral researchers about the opportunities and issues surrounding digital research while at the same time empowering us to make informed choices.

The digital landscape has both extended existing human behaviours and introduced new ones, as well as interweaving the two (Pink et al., 2016). For researchers it has thus altered what (phenomena) and how (methods) we research. The internet and digital technologies are enabling advances and contributions to scholarship across all disciplines. The creativity afforded by the new digitalised environment and the disruption to some of our established notions of knowledge and research practices offer potential new ways to envisage and conduct research (Knox and Walford, 2016). This book intends first to conceptualise digital research and then to provide questions and, we hope, some answers to researchers wishing to incorporate digital research in their investigations.

Digital technologies continue to have social implications in their effect on individuals and groups, as an enabler or otherwise (Belk, 2013). All social science subjects are affected by the digitalisation of society to some extent, from politics and citizen journalism, through geography and the mapping of movements, and healthcare and the monitoring of people’s wellbeing, to business and the real time reporting of e-commerce sales. Following the definition by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) we are including the following subjects within our framing of social science: development studies, human geography and planning, economics, education, social anthropology, linguistics, law, international relations and politics, psychology, management and business, social statistics and computing, and social policy (www.esrc.ac.uk/about-us/what-is-social-science/social-science-disciplines/). Digital research has the potential to develop new knowledge, enhance scholarly practice, encourage participation in research, and extend the reach and impact of research findings to new as well as existing audiences, yet it can also provide a daunting array of possibilities that can be difficult to make sense of.

As researchers we all work within personal, disciplinary, institutional and political constraints of varying types. Embarking on digital research will, potentially, place a researcher on less stable ground owing to the perceived newness of the terrain. This may cause doubt in the mind of the researcher. Doubts may also be manifested as scepticism or uncertainty on the part of a doctoral supervisory team or a university ethics review board. Research in previously uncharted territory is exciting, and learning to defend the choices made will help in the robustness of the research undertaken, but it can also be time consuming. Developing agility and flexibility as a digital researcher is necessary to manage research in the digital environment, but this agility can appear to conflict with the stable traditions of academic research. We suggest that anyone considering digital research should identify any constraints that may limit their ability to successfully undertake digital research. Researchers need, for example, to consider whether their technological skills are appropriate for the research they intend to undertake, and the extent to which their pre-existing knowledge concerning the digital context is relevant to a particular research problem. Disciplinary, institutional and organisational preferences should be acknowledged as well as the prevailing political landscape. It is currently popular to examine the Internet of Things (IoT) within a business perspective, visualising mass movement of people from human geography and the use of technology in the automation and subsequent change in the labour market from a political standpoint. For doctoral students, identifying supervisors who are open minded is a good starting point. For more established researchers, identifying research colleagues who are not risk adverse would be beneficial.

A critical issue to be cognisant of is that digital data are not politically, or socio-culturally neutral. Data are generated for a purpose; with codes used to create data sets and algorithms designed as a result of questions asked, or a commercial problem being solved. Google search results are not complete and unfiltered; using the API (Application Programming Interface) for a social media platform does not provide us with access to all the relevant content. Although it could be argued that non-digital data also have a political dimension, the lack of transparency in the digital data domain raises the level of uncertainty over the original purpose, intent and authenticity. A very useful starting point in understanding the development of digital research and also big data research is Youtie et al.’s (2017) paper charting early social science research in this sphere.

What do we Mean by Digital Research?

Digital research is not restricted to particular ontological or epistemological perspectives. Researchers using digital research methods or exploring digital phenomena may believe there is a single, knowable truth, or believe that there is no single truth that can be discerned. They may work towards uncovering a truth or explore how we construct our world. Whichever position we adopt does not preclude researching digital phenomena, impact on the usefulness of digital research as a method, or constrain our exploration of the digital research domain, though it obviously impacts on the particular methods we choose and the particular questions we explore. This book does not adopt a particular ontological or epistemological position as these are explored elsewhere (see, for example, Knox and Walford, 2016; Lankshear, 2003), rather it attempts to understand digital research and how it relates to the choices we all need to consider as researchers. Indeed one of the two authors of this book undertakes research at the more positivist end of the spectrum, while the other takes a more interpretivist approach to research.

Digital media, for the purposes of this book, encompasses all computer mediated internet and digitally enabled media through which data may be collected, shared and/or analysed, including, for example, blogs, online forums, QR codes, online questionnaires, emails, Skype interviewing, YouTube material, Instagram images, Twitter content, geo-location and internet navigation. Readers can see from this extensive, but not exhaustive, list that social media is included and as such we extend Scolari’s notion of ‘digital media’ as an umbrella term for the digital technology-based environment that allows ‘networking, multimedia, and collaborative and interactive communications’ (Scolari, 2009: 946, italic added).

Generally with the use of digital technology for research, emphasis has been placed on the use of digital communication tools to collect data and then as platforms on which to disseminate research findings. Some limited attention has been paid to the tools for analysis of digital data such as ATLAS.ti or NVivo and the development of open source analytical software, e.g. NodeXL, although this is highly limited owing to the potential commercial value to be made from digital data analysis. Increasingly large commercial firms are creating proprietorial tools for analysis of digital data (IBM, Microsoft, Google), thereby excluding all but a tiny number of selected academic researchers from accessing and exploring certain types of digital data. A concern has been raised in the academic community over the shrinking of access to both digital data and the tools with which to explore the data (Wessels et al., 2014).

Although we are proponents of engaging with digital technologies and digital research we are also aware that thinking is required about where the human/technology divide resides in research. One question to consider is which aspects of research should be trusted to automation. As computing power and data processing speed continues to accelerate we need to remember the value of sense making by humans and the connections that may be made by people acting as researchers rather than computer code and algorithms. Consider, for example, the implications of Facebook algorithms re-presenting us with our historic posts (Griffin, 2015). An algorithm that cannot distinguish between positive and negative events could be potentially harmful and this has been recognised, at least implicitly, by some social networking sites. Broad thinking about the consequences of automation needs to consider the challenges as well as the huge opportunities that automation might bring.

A second question to consider concerns research practices themselves. We should reflect on which elements of pre-digital research practice should be retained and which have become obsolete. ‘Good’ research requires us to understand the context in which we are undertaking research, and how that context impacts on our ability to ‘produce’ knowledge. A deep understanding of the digital context is problematic due to the dynamic nature of that environment. This means that we, as digital researchers, have to consciously maintain a questioning stance concerning, for instance, why we are asking the questions we ask, what we choose to read and how we interpret it, the choices we make concerning how we examine our research questions, and the implications of our methods of investigation on the knowledge we produce. Striving for good practice in research remains appropriate and critical reflection on the part of the researcher is still paramount.

As digital research develops as an area of research across the social sciences, different perspectives from different disciplines should be included wherever possible. Even within the social sciences, how digital is ‘seen’ and operationalised across subjects such as sociology, education, criminology and business and management will be different. A big digital research question that applies across all social science disciplines is the extent to which the digital context impacts on the theories and concepts of the discipline. Digital research may expose unconscious theoretical assumptions we have been making, help clarify conflicting findings by revealing a new conceptu...