Contro la deriva scissoria. Le funzioni dei big data nelle strategie integrate di ricerca sociale

Despite the undoubted benefits of Big Data, it may also pose the risk of a new divisive drift within social sciences. In the long term, the Big Data revolution could in fact lead to an eclipse of primary data collection procedures, with inevitable damage to the productivity of social research. This paper reconstructs a typology of strategies to integrate Big Data with conventional research pathways, re-evaluating the forgotten lessons of the American Schools of Chicago and Columbia. The typology is constructed by combining two criteria: the function of Big Data and the time order.