The COVID 19 pandemic illuminates the role data has in public policy-making, i.e. datafication of society, and the importance of exploring the local sources of data to reveal errors in what has assuredly been from the beginning an undercount of cases and deaths. I note four interrelated error sources. The first two are common to any quantitative…

Managing and analysing large qualitative datasets pose a particular challenge for researchers seeking a consistent and rigorous approach to qualitative data analysis. This paper describes and demonstrates the development and adoption of a matrix tool to guide the qualitative data analysis of a large sample (N = 122) of interview data. The paper…

Using secondary data has many advantages, but there are also many limitations, including the lack of relevant information. This article draws on a previous study that used secondary data to investigate substance use in young, elite athletes. Three types of missing data appeared: missing data, lack of information about the data collection process,…

Engaging with primary researchers during qualitative secondary analysis is a practice much recommended but rarely written about. In this article, I reflect on my experience of crossing an imagined boundary between the discrete textual dataset and its creators, of acknowledging and engaging with those researchers who invested in constructing the…

The benefits of government administrative data are well-established, but research has not examined processes by which these data can be identified, organised and governed in line with ethical considerations. This is an important undertaking given the potential benefits of robust administrative data, especially at a time when the collection of…

With growing social science interest in new materialist and posthuman ontologies, it is timely to explore how these may translate practically into social research methodologies. This task is complicated by differing interpretations of how new materialist precepts should shape research. This paper aims to fill a gap in the literature by setting out…

This article considers the multiple relations that emerge from and between Facebook commenters, as well as between commenters, researchers, and the research project during recruitment. To do so, we draw on our experiences of recruiting individuals who have concerns about or are opposed to a range of recent social and legal changes in…

Many ethical concerns in online big data research stem from a pervasive assumption that data are disembodied and place-less. While some scholars have begun addressing the ethical dilemmas of big data, few offer approaches or tools that fully grapple with the situatedness of online data and its ethical implications. We draw on feminist new…

As our modern world has become increasingly digitalized, various types of data from different data domains are available that can enrich survey data. To link survey data to other sources, consent from the survey respondents is required. This article compares consent to data linkage requests for seven data domains: administrative data, smartphone…

The global scale of COVID-19 has constrained academics from conducting much person-facing research. Reactively, trend is increasing for digital-based methodologies capturing already existing online data. Scholars often 'scrape' user-postings from internet forums using coding algorithms and text capture tools, before analysing data, drawing…

The use of social media platforms as a means of data collection for researchers is increasing. With the number of active users of Facebook across the globe exceeding two billion, the platform offers a means to reach and hear from diverse populations and gather information-rich data. Despite an increase of researchers utilising Facebook and…

This article reports on our experience of collecting language data from informants in video-conferencing settings under a research design originally developed with face-to-face interactions in mind. We had set out to investigate whether individual stylistic features persist in different modes of textual production and designed a complex set of…

The interaction of quantitative and qualitative methodology in the mixed methods research (MMR) is analysed in a context of distinctions of the meanings between the terms typically used for description, combination, and integration. The interaction in the phases that precede the results, and their interpretation is considered. As an indicator of…

The Imitation Game is a new method and, as such, it is important to show that its results are plausible and replicable. We tested this by conducting Imitation Games on religion in a range of European countries, returning approximately 12 months later to repeat the research. The idea was that non-Christian members of strongly Christian countries…

While digital tools are often recommended for researchers, there is a lack of evidence around effective social media strategies among researchers to optimise participant recruitment and data collection. However, an 'add Facebook and stir' approach could create extra burden for participants or foil researchers' efforts. Participant recruitment…