ORCID

0000-0003-4798-9154 (Buskirk)

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Publication Title

Methods Data Analyses

Volume

19

Issue

2

Pages

4-10

Abstract

[Introduction] Across the quantitative social sciences, researchers increasingly face significant challenges and opportunities prompted by the arrival of new sources of very rich, highly granular, and often unstructured digital data. While traditional methods such as surveys and content analysis tools remain indispensable for measuring individual attitudes, behaviors, demographic characteristics, and media messaging online, they often struggle to capture the complex multimodal information streams and metadata generated by social media platforms, mobile devices, sensors, and tracking applications. Collecting and analyzing these diverse new forms of content, dynamic moment-to-moment behaviors, and naturally occurring interactions has become a pressing and exciting research task-one that holds real promise for answering longstanding research questions more completely and, in some cases, more accurately. Yet as access to these data grows, so too do the problems they pose in terms of representativeness, potential new sources of bias, complex preprocessing demands, and reproducibility.

Rights

© The Authors 2025.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the authors and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Original Publication Citation

Gibson, R., & Buskirk, T. D. (2025). An overview of the special issue. Methods Data Analyses, 19(2), 4-10. https://majournals.bib.uni-mannheim.de/mda/article/view/1046

Download

Share

 
COinS