The Internet has emerged as a popular medium for collecting data because of its ability to access millions of users, facilitate an array of research designs, & efficiently deliver & compile questionnaires. This volume offers advice on how to utilize the power of the Internet efficiently.

Part of SAGE’s Mastering Business Research Methods Series, conceived and edited by Bill Lee, Mark N. K. Saunders and Vadake K. Narayanan and designed to support researchers by providing in-depth and practical guidance on using a chosen method of data collection or analysis. In Collecting Qualitative Data Using Digital Methods, Rebecca Whiting and Katrina Pritchard provide a concise and accessible guide to a digital data collection method, comprised of tracking and trawling that can be used to collect qualitative data in the fields of business, management and organizational research. With practical guidance and insight into how to use this approach in your own research, this book provides invaluable support to Business and Management masters students who choose to work with secondary data when completing their dissertations.

Foreword by Steven Pinker Blending the informed analysis of The Signal and the Noise with the instructive iconoclasm of Think Like a Freak, a fascinating, illuminating, and witty look at what the vast amounts of information now instantly available to us reveals about ourselves and our world—provided we ask the right questions. By the end of an average day in the early twenty-first century, human beings searching the internet will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data. This staggering amount of information—unprecedented in history—can tell us a great deal about who we are—the fears, desires, and behaviors that drive us, and the conscious and unconscious decisions we make. From the profound to the mundane, we can gain astonishing knowledge about the human psyche that less than twenty years ago, seemed unfathomable. Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race to sex, gender and more, all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters didn’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s black? Does where you go to school effect how successful you are in life? Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls? Do violent films affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? How regularly do we lie about our sex lives and who’s more self-conscious about sex, men or women? Investigating these questions and a host of others, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand ourselves and our lives better. Drawing on studies and experiments on how we really live and think, he demonstrates in fascinating and often funny ways the extent to which all the world is indeed a lab. With conclusions ranging from strange-but-true to thought-provoking to disturbing, he explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potential—revealing biases deeply embedded within us, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we’re afraid to ask that might be essential to our health—both emotional and physical. All of us are touched by big data everyday, and its influence is multiplying. Everybody Lies challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world.

Scholars from a range of disciplines discuss research methods, theories, and conceptual approaches in the study of internet governance. The design and governance of the internet has become one of the most pressing geopolitical issues of our era. The stability of the economy, democracy, and the public sphere are wholly dependent on the stability and security of the internet. Revelations about election hacking, facial recognition technology, and government surveillance have gotten the public's attention and made clear the need for scholarly research that examines internet governance both empirically and conceptually. In this volume, scholars from a range of disciplines consider research methods, theories, and conceptual approaches in the study of internet governance.

Netnography is an adaptation of ethnography for the online world, pioneered by Robert Kozinets, and is concerned with the study of online cultures and communities as distinct social phenomena, rather than isolated content. In this landmark third edition, Netnography: The Essential Guide provides the theoretical and methodological groundwork as well as the practical applications, helping students both understand and do netnographic research projects of their own. Packed with enhanced learning features throughout, linking concepts to structured activities in a step by step way, the book is also now accompanied by a striking new visual design and further case studies, offering the essential student resource to conducting online ethnographic research. Real world examples provided demonstrate netnography in practice across the social sciences, in media and cultural studies, anthropology, education, nursing, travel and tourism, and others.

Data collection in the field, whether by interviewing or other methods, can be carried out in a structured, systematic and scientific way. This volume compels field researchers to take very seriously not only what they hear, but what they ask. Ethnographers have often discovered too late that the value of their interview information is discounted as a consequence of poor sampling (of both questions and informants) and poor elicitation techniques. The authors focus on the importance of establishing the right questions to ask through the use of free listing techniques; then they describe in practical terms the administration of an impressive array of alternative kinds of informant task. They conclude with a discussion of reliability and validity of various methods which can be used to generate more systematic, culturally meaningful data.

The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Collection is a timely overview of the methodological developments available to social science researchers, covering key themes including: Concepts, Contexts, Basics Verbal Data Digital and Internet Data Triangulation and Mixed Methods Collecting Data in Specific Populations.