Abstract
While big data (BD) has been around for a while now, the social sciences have been comparatively cautious in its adoption for research purposes. This article briefly discusses the scope and variety of BD, and its research potential and ethical implications for the social sciences and sociology, which derive from these characteristics. For example, BD allows for the analysis of actual (online) behavior and the analysis of networks on a grand scale. The sheer volume and variety of data allow for the detection of rare patterns and behaviors that would otherwise go unnoticed. However, there are also a range of ethical issues of BD that need consideration. These entail, amongst others, the imperative for documentation and dissemination of methods, data, and results, the problems of anonymization and re-identification, and the questions surrounding the ability of stakeholders in big data research and institutionalized bodies to handle ethical issues. There are also grave risks involved in the (mis)use of BD, as it holds great value for companies, criminals, and state actors alike. The article concludes that BD holds great potential for the social sciences, but that there are still a range of practical and ethical issues that need addressing.
Highlights
Many aspects of everyday life are moving into the digital sphere and becoming more reliant on the digitalization of society (Marres 2017)
While big data (BD) has been around for a while the social sciences have been comparatively cautious in its adoption for research purposes
This article briefly discusses the scope and variety of BD, and its research potential and ethical implications for the social sciences and sociology, which derive from these characteristics
Summary
Many aspects of everyday life are moving into the digital sphere and becoming more reliant on the digitalization of society (Marres 2017). For commercial agents, speed in transmitting information and analyzing patterns often is a key advantage over competitors (e.g., in stock market trading), making BD the basis of a new wave of business models (Hartmann et al 2016) Managing such volumes of data while people have access to them constantly all the time requires hardware and software resources on a grand scale. The variety of different data forms, such as text, pictures, and videos associated with tags, geo-codes, paradata, and metadata, are part of the reason why such data appear so appealing to social researchers (Evans and Foster 2019) They offer new opportunities to address research questions they have not been able to answer previously (Ruths and Pfeffer 2014). This article discusses some ethical concerns in the use of big data for social research informed by considerations related to sociology and neighboring disciplines
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