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Phoenix666 writes:

The internet dominates our world and each one of us is leaving a larger digital footprint as more time passes. Those footprints are ripe for studying, experts say.

In a recently published paper, a group of Stanford sociology experts encourage other sociologists and social psychologists to focus on developing online research studies with the help of big data in order to advance the theories of social interaction and structure.

[...] In the new study, the researchers make a case for "online field experiments" that could be embedded within the structure of existing communities on the internet.

The researchers differentiate online field experiments from online lab experiments, which create a controlled online situation instead of using preexisting environments that have engaged participants.

"The internet is not just another mechanism for recruiting more subjects," Parigi said. "There is now space for what we call computational social sciences that lies at the intersection of sociology, psychology, computer science and other technical sciences, through which we can try to understand human behavior as it is shaped and illuminated by online platforms."

As part of this type of experiment, researchers would utilize online platforms to take advantage of big data and predictive algorithms. Recruiting and retaining participants for such field studies is therefore more challenging and time-consuming because of the need for a close partnership with the platforms.

But online field experiments allow researchers to gain an enhanced look at certain human behaviors that cannot be replicated in a laboratory environment, the researchers said.

For example, theories about how and why people trust each other can be better examined in the online environments, the researchers said, because the context of different complex social relationships is recorded. In laboratory experiments, researchers can only isolate the type of trust that occurs between strangers, which is called "thin" trust.

Is Big Data the path to respectability for the social sciences?

More information: Paolo Parigi et al. Online Field Experiments, Social Psychology Quarterly (2017). DOI: 10.1177/0190272516680842

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