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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday April 05 2017, @12:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the lab-rats-online dept.

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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  • (Score: 2) by TGV on Wednesday April 05 2017, @05:50AM (1 child)

    by TGV (2838) on Wednesday April 05 2017, @05:50AM (#489028)

    Sounds right to me. Even worse is that it's nearly impossible to translate any meaningful theory into a test on a questionnaire without making a huge amount of assumptions, and this strategy seems to add a bias in the sampled group and a dependency on the actual tool used. That's far from ideal.

    An example. A university teacher recently proposed to have students use Twitter and "sentiment analysis" to do some kind of research. He didn't know the tool, and didn't even realize that a Twitter search yields different results for different users. The group that discussed this proposal was rather international, and most people got similar search results and analyses, but some got results that were clearly tailored to specific countries. Still most people there thought it would be a good tool for the students. The proposal above seems like just a bigger version of the same problem.

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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday April 05 2017, @05:23PM

    by looorg (578) on Wednesday April 05 2017, @05:23PM (#489225)

    One of the issues they don't seem to touch on is where are you going to get the data, are the people with the data going to want to share or are these Sociologists going to have to get a job at like Facebook or Google and if they do those reports are going to be like smoking reports put out by tobacco companies - everything is fine and dandy etc.

    Christian Rudder is some big cheese over at OkCupid and he used their data to write a few books on data analysis called Dataclysm: who we are when we think no one's looking, it showed that you can do interesting things with the data but at the same time he is some big cheese over at the company so it's doubtful anyone else could have done the things he did. It also shows that regardless of or to the book title someone is looking - he and their system was. Question about his study then becomes are these things unique for OkCupid users or are they somehow universal? Would other dating sites show the same patters? Unless they are universal they are almost worthless - it's like being told that Coke drinkers like Coke over Pepsi.

    I read the first of Rudders book, but not the second one. It was entertaining and interesting but at the same time somewhat pointless result-wise: People like to date other people with similar interests to their own, in their age group and of their own race. Hardly surprising. Not something you need big data to figure out or hadn't been noticed before. So it's just another tool and as stated in my previous post I do believe this will be a very small and marginal area of Sociology -- mostly cause most of them that I have met are really bad at maths and can't or won't program so these data analysis packages will have to be really damn intuitive and simple to use if they hope to get any users at all cause these people won't write their own stuff in R, mine any social platforms on their own or work with Hadoop and similar.

    Also there seems to be some idea that Big Data is somehow immune to all the issues with normal data. Like all the data gathered is going to be golden somehow and not filled to the brim with shit that you can't do anything with or will require so much massaging you could open up your own massage-parlor - there will be happy endings for all involved after that.

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dataclysm-When-Think-Ones-Looking/dp/0008101000 [amazon.co.uk]
    https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offline-Selves/dp/0385347391 [amazon.com]