Promises and Pitfalls of Using Digital Traces for Demographic Research

Abstract

The digital traces that we leave online are increasingly fruitful sources of data for social scientists, including those interested in demographic research. The collection and use of digital data also presents numerous statistical, computational, and ethical challenges, motivating the development of new research approaches to address these burgeoning issues. In this article, we argue that researchers with formal training in demography—those who have a history of developing innovative approaches to using challenging data—are well positioned to contribute to this area of work. We discuss the benefits and challenges of using digital trace data for social and demographic research, and we review examples of current demographic literature that creatively use digital trace data to study processes related to fertility, mortality, and migration. Focusing on Facebook data for advertisers—a novel “digital census” that has largely been untapped by demographers—we provide illustrative and empirical examples of how demographic researchers can manage issues such as bias and representation when using digital trace data. We conclude by offering our perspective on the road ahead regarding demography and its role in the data revolution.

Enhancing big data in the social sciences with crowdsourcing: Data augmentation practices, techniques, and opportunities

“…In this section, we consider the implications of both the content analysis and our three case studies in the context of past recommendations about online crowdsourcing for academic research. We aim to provide evidence-based guidance for researchers in two situations: (1) PLOS ONE those exploring the viability of online crowdsourced data augmentation for a project, and (2) those seeking to improve the validity and value of data augmentation efforts with online crowdsourcing. While we believe this guidance will be most useful to researchers seeking to apply big data to social science research questions, we think that they may be of interest to researchers conducting more traditional social science analyses as well.…”

“…In other words, we argue that online crowdsourcing applications offer a scalable blend of manual and automated approaches to data augmentation that can easily be harnessed to increase validity and value for big data applications to social science research questions. We build this case in five steps: (1) review the use and perceived limitations of big data in the social sciences, (2) describe the online crowdsourcing process and its documented strengths and limitations as a platform for academic research, (3) investigate current practices in academic use of the largest online crowdsourcing platform, (4) conduct three case studies implementing online crowdsourcing to enhance ongoing sociological research and test the utility of crowdsourcing across different circumstances, and (5) draw on the above, as well as experiments embedded within the case studies, to produce evidence-based recommendations on when and how to implement online crowdsourcing to augment big data for best results. Finally, in light of the inconsistent and frequently incomplete reporting of online crowdsourcing procedures, we provide a recommended reporting template for online crowdsourcing as an academic data augmentation platform.…”

“…Big data and computational approaches present a potential paradigm shift in the social sciences, particularly since they allow for measuring human behaviors that cannot be observed with survey research [1,2,3]. In fact, the transformative potential of big data for the social sciences has been compared to how "the invention of the telescope revolutionized the study of the heavens" [4].…”

Internal migration in the United States: A comprehensive comparative assessment of the Consumer Credit Panel

“…The CCP data are a valuable and underutilized resource for studying US internal migration. While descriptive, we hope that our work in this paper will help to stimulate future efforts to use these and other nontraditional sources of data, such as social media data (Cesare et al 2018), to study migration. In the process, we hope that the use of the CCP and other nontraditional sources of migration data will contribute to important conversations about [improving] the availability, quality, and comparability of migration data more generally.…”

“…Our results firmly establish the comparative utility and clearly illustrate some of the unique advantages of the CCP relative to other data sources on US internal migration, thereby warranting greater use of these data in future research on internal migration in the United States. More broadly, whether focused on the United States or not, our work adds to the growing body of research on the use of nontraditional data sources, such as social media data (Cesare et al 2018), to study migration given welldocumented problems with the availability, quality, and comparability of migration data from traditional sources like censuses and surveys.…”