Digital Footprints: Opportunities and Challenges for Online Social Research
Digital Footprints: Opportunities and Challenges for Online Social Research
复制标题
DOI：
10.1146/annurev-soc-071913-043145
复制
发表时间：
2014-01-01
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Macy, Michael W.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Golder, Scott A.;Macy, Michael W.
在线互动现在是全世界数亿人口的日常生活的一部分。这些相互作用在个体事件的水平上产生人类行为和社会互动的细粒度时间戳记录，但在规模上是全球性的，使研究人员能够通过使用观察数据和进行体内实地实验来解决有关社会身份，地位，冲突，合作，集体行动和扩散的基本问题。这一前所未有的机遇带来了许多方法上的挑战，包括将观察结果推广到离线世界，保护个人隐私，以及解决“大数据”和基于网络的实验带来的后勤挑战。我们回顾了当前在线社会研究的进展，并批判性地评估了理论和方法的机会和局限性。
Online interaction is now a regular part of daily life for a demographically diverse population of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. These interactions generate fine-grained time-stamped records of human behavior and social interaction at the level of individual events, yet are global in scale, allowing researchers to address fundamental questions about social identity, status, conflict, cooperation, collective action, and diffusion, both by using observational data and by conducting in vivo field experiments. This unprecedented opportunity comes with a number of methodological challenges, including generalizing observations to the offline world, protecting individual privacy, and solving the logistical challenges posed by "big data" and web-based experiments. We review current advances in online social research and critically assess the theoretical and methodological opportunities and limitations.