Summary
Contents
Subject index
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.
The Changing Research Landscape
The Changing Research Landscape
In this chapter we will:
- outline the ways in which research boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred
- describe macro-level reflections for digital researchers
- describe micro-level reflections for digital researchers
- emphasise the central role of contextuality in digital research decisions.
Introduction
This chapter opens with a discussion of how the well-established characteristics, strengths and weaknesses of different types of research methods (e.g., qualitative/quantitative) are blurred in the digital environment. It explores how the digital era is now influencing our understanding of broad classes of research techniques and raises questions concerning the boundaries of traditional ‘classifications’ of research methods. This leads to questions concerning whether the established ‘boundaries’ used to classify research (e.g., qualitative/quantitative) remain as useful in the digital research environment. The theme of blurred boundaries is ...
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