The availability of digital data has sparked an ongoing debate within the social sciences about the extent of innovation that the digital world is bringing to research. Overall, we are in a transitional moment, when ‘traditional methods’ are still widely applied and their transposition online, or ‘digitalisation’, has been the first step towards the exploitation of the digital for social scientific purposes. While the digitalisation of ‘traditional methods’ emphasises the continuity with current social research techniques, some argue that a ‘native’ approach should be the aim of developing new ones. Native digital methods that are convincing are still to come; it is right to point out that the transposition of existing methods is not likely to be sufficient in the near future? Should methodological principles remain the same? Or digital methods require a new set? Furthermore, the debate about native and not native has focused much more on data collection methods than on analytical ones.
Professor of Research Methodology and Cognitive Sociology, Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento
