Big Data for Qualitative Research covers everything small data researchers need to know about big data, from the potentials of big data analytics to its methodological and ethical challenges. The ...data that we generate in everyday life is now digitally mediated, stored, and analyzed by web sites, companies, institutions, and governments. Big data is large volume, rapidly generated, digitally encoded information that is often related to other networked data, and can provide valuable evidence for study of 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. It debates new concerns about ethics, privacy, and dataveillance for big data qualitative researchers. This book is essential reading for those who do qualitative and mixed methods research, and are curious, excited, or even skeptical about big data and what it means for future research. Now is the time for researchers to understand, debate, and envisage the new possibilities and challenges of the rapidly developing and dynamic field of big data from the vantage point of the qualitative researcher.
This open access textbook offers a practical guide into research ethics for undergraduate students in the social sciences. A step-by-step approach of the most viable issues, in-depth discussions of ...case histories and a variety of didactical tools will aid the student to grasp the issues at hand and help him or her develop strategies to deal with them. This book addresses problems and questions that any bachelor student in the social sciences should be aware of, including plagiarism, data fabrication and other types of fraud, data augmentation, various forms of research bias, but also peer pressure, issues with confidentiality and questions regarding conflicts of interest. Cheating, ‘free riding’, and broader issues that relate to the place of the social sciences in society are also included. The book concludes with a step-by-step approach designed to coach a student through a research application process.
Digital Methods Rogers, Richard
2013, 20130510, 2019-06-20
eBook
In Digital Methods , Richard Rogers proposes a methodological outlook for social and cultural scholarly research on the Web that seeks to move Internet research beyond the study of online culture. It ...is not a toolkit for Internet research, or operating instructions for a software package; it deals with broader questions. How can we study social media to learn something about society rather than about social media use? How can hyperlinks reveal not just the value of a Web site but the politics of association? Rogers proposes repurposing Web-native techniques for research into cultural change and societal conditions. We can learn to reapply such "methods of the medium" as crawling and crowd sourcing, PageRank and similar algorithms, tag clouds and other visualizations; we can learn how they handle hits, likes, tags, date stamps, and other Web-native objects. By "thinking along" with devices and the objects they handle, digital research methods can follow the evolving methods of the medium. Rogers uses this new methodological outlook to examine the findings of inquiries into 9/11 search results, the recognition of climate change skeptics by climate-change-related Web sites, the events surrounding the Srebrenica massacre according to Dutch, Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian Wikipedias, presidential candidates' social media "friends," and the censorship of the Iranian Web. With Digital Methods , Rogers introduces a new vision and method for Internet research and at the same time applies them to the Web's objects of study, from tiny particles (hyperlinks) to large masses (social media).
Did mandatory busing programs in the 1970s increase the school achievement of disadvantaged minority youth? Does obtaining a college degree increase an individual's labor market earnings? Did the use ...of the butterfly ballot in some Florida counties in the 2000 presidential election cost Al Gore votes? If so, was the number of miscast votes sufficiently large to have altered the election outcome? At their core, these types of questions are simple cause-and-effect questions. Simple cause-and-effect questions are the motivation for much empirical work in the social sciences. This book presents a model and set of methods for causal effect estimation that social scientists can use to address causal questions such as these. The essential features of the counterfactual model of causality for observational data analysis are presented with examples from sociology, political science, and economics.
For knowledge to benefit research and society, it must be trustworthy. Trustworthy research is robust, rigorous, and transparent at all stages of design, execution, and reporting. Assessment of ...researchers still rarely includes considerations related to trustworthiness, rigor, and transparency. We have developed the Hong Kong Principles (HKPs) as part of the 6th World Conference on Research Integrity with a specific focus on the need to drive research improvement through ensuring that researchers are explicitly recognized and rewarded for behaviors that strengthen research integrity. We present five principles: responsible research practices; transparent reporting; open science (open research); valuing a diversity of types of research; and recognizing all contributions to research and scholarly activity. For each principle, we provide a rationale for its inclusion and provide examples where these principles are already being adopted.
Getting research into policy and practice in healthcare is a recognised, world-wide concern. As an attempt to bridge the gap between research and practice, research funders are requesting more ...interdisciplinary and collaborative research, while actual experiences of such processes have been less studied. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to gain more knowledge on the interdisciplinary, collaborative and partnership research process by investigating researchers' experiences of and approaches to the process, based on their participation in an inventive national research programme. The programme aimed to boost collaborative and partnership research and build learning structures, while improving ways to lead, manage and develop practices in Swedish health and social services.
Interviews conducted with project leaders and/or lead researchers and documentation from 20 projects were analysed using directed and conventional content analysis.
Collaborative approaches were achieved by design, e.g. action research, or by involving practitioners from several levels of the healthcare system in various parts of the research process. The use of dual roles as researcher/clinician or practitioner/PhD student or the use of education designed especially for practitioners or 'student researchers' were other approaches. The collaborative process constituted the area for the main lessons learned as well as the main problems. Difficulties concerned handling complexity and conflicts between different expectations and demands in the practitioner's and researcher's contexts, and dealing with human resource issues and group interactions when forming collaborative and interdisciplinary research teams. The handling of such challenges required time, resources, knowledge, interactive learning and skilled project management.
Collaborative approaches are important in the study of complex phenomena. Results from this study show that allocated time, arenas for interactions and skills in project management and communication are needed during research collaboration to ensure support and build trust and understanding with involved practitioners at several levels in the healthcare system. For researchers, dealing with this complexity takes time and energy from the scientific process. For practitioners, this puts demands on understanding a research process and how it fits with on-going organisational agendas and activities and allocating time. Some of the identified factors may be overlooked by funders and involved stakeholders when designing, performing and evaluating interdisciplinary, collaborative and partnership research.
Background
A growing literature explores the coproduction of research knowledge. Barriers to coproduction in mental health research have been identified, especially for the people from marginalized ...communities. There is an established body of participatory research that has potential to inform coproduction in mental health research.
Objectives
To explore and articulate how learning from community participatory approaches to research enable barriers to knowledge coproduction to be overcome in mental health research.
Setting
An evaluation of a primary care mental health service, led by an experienced survivor researcher, supported by a health service researcher and involving a team of community co‐researchers.
Design
Cycles of reflective writing (first‐person narrative) by the authors, and feedback from the co‐researcher team, on their experiences of undertaking the evaluation were used to explore the ways in which community actors, including those from marginalized communities, might be meaningfully involved in producing research knowledge about mental health services.
Results
A space was created where community co‐researchers, including those from traditionally marginalized communities, felt safe and empowered to move beyond essentialized “service user” identities and bring a range of skills and expertise to the evaluation. There was meaningful rebalancing of power between traditional university and community roles, although the issues around leadership remained complex and more could be done to explore how our different experiences of race and mental health shape the research we do.
Conclusions
Potential was demonstrated for participatory research approaches to inform coproduction of knowledge in mental health research that fully reflects the diversity of identity and experience.
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