Researching Digital Life


Book Description

We now live in a world where all aspects of everyday life are thoroughly mediated by digital technologies. Making sense of digital life is accordingly an essential undertaking for social science and humanities scholars. This multidisciplinary book provides an essential guide to researching digital life: Orienting readers with respect to methodologies, research design, and research ethics. Detailing key research methods, including interviews, surveys, ethnographies, walking methodologies, arts-based and participatory approaches, historical analysis, data visualisation, mapping and data analytics. Demonstrating these methods in action in real-world studies that have investigated apps and interfaces, social and locative media, mobilities, smart cities, and digital labour and work. The authors provide: • Non-Eurocentric perspectives and case studies from diverse disciplines • Annotated further reading to help you situate your research alongside existing research in your field • An outline of future directions for researching digital life. Accessible in style and richly illustrated, the chapters provide a wealth of key insights and practical information to ensure research projects are successfully planned and implemented.




Researching Digital Media and Society


Book Description

We live in an increasingly digitised society. In an age of digital identities, rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence and ever more sophisticated software available, our methods for researching digital media must be flexible and adaptable. This book will help you to understand why researchers in this field choose and use particular research methods, equipping you to put these methods into practice across the whole range of undergraduate media courses. This book shows you how research methods can help us to make sense of the myriad of information we encounter online every day, from Tiktok influencers to viral Twitter posts. Complete with case studies in each chapter, the book covers both well-established methods, such as network analysis, and cutting-edge ones, such as interface analysis. It provides a crucial foundation for research in digital media, demonstrating the scope and potential of these tools. The book adopts an easy-to-navigate structure, taking you through specific methods in a systematic way. It shows you examples of classic uses of each method, and directs you towards further resources after each chapter.




Researching Social Life


Book Description

`This new edition of this excellent guide maintains the standard of the original whilst taking full account of developments in both methodological discussion and the techniques of social research. The organization of the text around the research process is a great strength of the text' - David Byrne, University of Durham Preview the Third Edition's opening chapter and guide to its teaching and learning features designed to stimulate student engagement with the content here The Third Edition of Nigel Gilbert's hugely successful Researching Social Life covers the whole range of methods from quantitative to qualitative in a down-to-earth and unthreatening manner. Gilbert's text offers the best coverage of the full scope of research methods of any of the leading textbooks in the field, making this an essential text for any student starting a research methods course or doing a research project. This thoroughly revised text is driven by the expertise of a writing team comprised of internationally-renowned experts in the field. New to the Third Edition are chapters on: - Searching and Reviewing the Literature - Refining the Question - Grounded Theory and Inductive Research - Mixed Methods - Participatory Action Research - Virtual Methods - Narrative Analysis A number of useful features, such as worked examples, case studies, discussion questions, project ideas and checklists are included throughout the book to help those new to research to engage with the material. Researching Social Life follows the 'life cycle' of a typical research project, from initial conception through to eventual publication. Its breadth and depth of coverage make this an indispensable must-have textbook for students on social research methods courses in any discipline.




Digital Ethics


Book Description

In a digital age of perceived anonymity and diminishing face-to-face contact what does it mean to be true to thyself? Has the internet given us license to be false to others, without consequence? Technology has given us capabilities we previously did not have and changed the way we think about time and space. Although research is now being done on many aspects of the interplay between humans and technology, there currently exists a vacuum regarding behavior and usage of technology. This edited volume contains some of the best research on digital ethics from authors in communication, law, information studies, education, philosophy, political science, computer science, and business on topics that range from sexting to piracy. This groundbreaking volume contributes to the growing body of knowledge in this area and provides a much-needed resource for scholars and teachers interested in exploring ethics in this new digital world.




Digital Sociology


Book Description

This provocative new introduction to the field of digital sociology offers a critical overview of interdisciplinary debates about new ways of knowing society that are emerging today at the interface of computing, media, social research and social life. Digital Sociology introduces key concepts, methods and understandings that currently inform the development of specifically digital forms of social enquiry. Marres assesses the relevance and usefulness of digital methods, data and techniques for the study of sociological phenomena and evaluates the major claim that computation makes possible a new ‘science of society’. As Marres argues, the digital does much more than inspire innovation in social research: it forces us to engage anew with fundamental sociological questions. We must learn to appreciate that the digital has the capacity to throw into crisis existing knowledge frameworks and is likely to reconfigure wider relations. This timely engagement with a key transformation of our age will be indispensable reading for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in digital sociology, digital media, computing and society.




Aging and the Digital Life Course


Book Description

Across the life course, new forms of community, ways of keeping in contact, and practices for engaging in work, healthcare, retail, learning and leisure are evolving rapidly. This book examines how developments in smart phones, the Internet, cloud computing, and online social networking are redefining experiences and expectations around growing older in the twenty-first century. Drawing on contributions from leading commentators and researchers across the world, this book explores key themes such as caregiving, the use of social media, robotics, chronic disease and dementia management, gaming, migration, and data inheritance, to name a few.




Digital Sociologies


Book Description

This handbook offers a much-needed overview of the rapidly growing field of digital sociology. Rooted in a critical understanding of inequality as foundational to digital sociology, it connects digital media technologies to traditional areas of study in sociology, such as labor, culture, education, race, class, and gender. It covers a wide variety of topics, including web analytics, wearable technologies, social media analysis, and digital labor. The result is a benchmark volume that places the digital squarely at the forefront of contemporary investigations of the social.




Doing Qualitative Research Online


Book Description

Qualitative researchers can now connect with participants online to collect deep, rich data and generate new understandings of contemporary research phenomena. Doing Qualitative Research Online gives students and researchers the practical and scholarly foundations needed to gain digital research literacies essential for designing and conducting studies based on qualitative data collected online. The book will take a broad view of methodologies, methods and ethics, covering: Ethical issues in research design and ethical relationships with participants Designing online qualitative studies Collecting qualitative data online through interviews, observations, participatory and arts-based research and a wide range of posts and documents. Analyzing data and reporting findings Written by a scholar-practitioner in e-learning and online academia with 15 years’ experience, this book will help all those new to online research by providing a range of examples and illustrations from published research. The text and accompanying materials will offer discussion and assignment ideas for ease of adoption.




Researching Daily Life


Book Description

"A step-by-step guide to researching what people do in their everyday lives. This practical, beginner-friendly book teaches readers how to do daily life research, which is the study of what people do in their ordinary environments in their everyday lives. The basic approach is to collect data intensively over time, at least once a day for many days, in people's natural environments rather than in research labs. Common methods include daily diaries, experience sampling, and ecological momentary assessment. Collectively, these methods trade off the control and precision of the lab for the texture, depth, and realism of the real world. The book walks readers through the entire process of the research project, including first selecting a design and developing survey items, then collecting and cleaning data, and finally analyzing and disseminating the findings. With example studies pulled from all areas of psychology, the book will provide students with the conceptual foundation and practical knowledge needed to examine psychological processes "up close" in ways that experimental and survey methods can't"--




Parenting for a Digital Future


Book Description

"In the decades it takes to bring up a child, parents face challenges that are both helped and hindered by the fact that they are living through a period of unprecedented digital innovation. Drawing on extensive research with diverse parents, this book reveals how digital technologies give personal and political parenting struggles a distinctive character, as parents determine how to forge new territory with little precedent, or support. The book reveals the pincer movement of parenting in late modernity. Parents are both more burdened with responsibilities and charged with respecting the agency of their child-leaving much to negotiate in today's "democratic" families. The book charts how parents now often enact authority and values through digital technologies-as "screen time," games, or social media become ways of both being together and setting boundaries. The authors show how digital technologies introduce both valued opportunities and new sources of risk. To light their way, parents comb through the hazy memories of their own childhoods and look toward varied imagined futures. This results in deeply diverse parenting in the present, as parents move between embracing, resisting, or balancing the role of technology in their own and their children's lives. This book moves beyond the panicky headlines to offer a deeply researched exploration of what it means to parent in a period of significant social and technological change. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative research in the United Kingdom, the book offers conclusions and insights relevant to parents, policymakers, educators, and researchers everywhere"--