Learn about creative methods for collecting data from a co-editor of a new book on the topic!

Learn about action research and the work of AR+

Virtual reality offers a realistic and controlled research environment, presenting an opportunity for the future of valid and reliable research in the social sciences. This blog introduces a new tool that enables real-time experience measurement in VR, under development with support from the SAGE Concept Grant.

One might ask why researchers go to the effort of undertaking unconventional, path-breaking work? What makes some scientists more likely to engage in research that breaks from tradition, despite the risks? In our recent study, we considered two possible explanations. First, we thought that scholars affiliated with high-status demographic...

Coming from a social science background, I have had very limited exposure to data science. I was therefore excited to learn about the emerging field of computational social science and the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) presented the right opportunity. I applied to the 2019 SICSS and I was accepted for the Cape Town partner site. I went in not knowing what to expect but by the end of the first day I knew the experience at the two-week Summer Institute was going to be truly worthwhile.

I coined the term "enacted" to describe emerging types of creative methods. Enacted approaches involve multiple interactions and a deep degree of collaboration that 
involves researcher(s) and 
one or more participants.

It’s all about incentives. The current academic ecosystem incentivises publication in high impact factor journals and grant capture above all else, but there is more to being an academic than producing journal articles and winning grants. Luckily there are an increasing number of initiatives that are helping academics get credit for more of the work they do and increase their broader impact. This post rounds up some of the most interesting efforts.

The beginning of term is nearing. You’re teaching a new module on Computational Social Science (CSS). The field is developing rapidly and so are best practices around teaching the theory, methods and techniques to students.

Where do you start when you’re putting together your teaching materials? Do you visit the websites and blogs of academics who are experienced in teaching CSS to look for resources? Do you search online for syllabi, reading lists and tutorials? Maybe you scour YouTube for videos to include in your slides?

Together with a group of UK academics, the SAGE Ocean team have been digging into where academics go to find teaching materials and what the barriers are for academics who want to share, reuse and give and get credit for the materials they produce for teaching. This post includes thoughts from the group on what’s needed to promote a stronger culture of sharing teaching materials in CSS. And we’ve curated a list of our favorite resources for you too!

Sam Gilbert demonstrates the value of big search data for social scientists, and suggests some practical steps to using internet search data in your own research.

View the Get Creative! Research with Pictures & Stories webinar

As the leader of a data science team at the Urban Institute, I get to work on interesting issues that intersect data science and social science every day. By data science, I mean technical tools, architectures, and processes that are borrowed from computer science and are atypical in the social sciences. This is a slightly more limited definition than most would have for the term data science, but because so much of what defines a data scientist at Urban also defines a researcher — cleaning data, analyzing it, visualizing results, etc. — my definition draws a finer line.

Earlier this year Allen AI were announced as the winners of the NYU Coleridge Initiative’s Rich Context Competition. The goal of the competition was to automate the discovery of research datasets and the associated research methods and fields of social science research publications. You can find out about all the finalists and their work here.

We caught up with Allen AI to talk about the work and their involvement in this year’s competition.

Watch our panel event from the ESRC Festival of Social Science on what skills social scientists will need to be able to do the social research of the future.

SAGE Research Methods has launched a new Data Science video collection, with hours of educational material for researchers of all levels and backgrounds.