The data revolution in social science needs qualitative research

Grigoropoulou, Nikolitsa; Small, Mario Luis

doi:10.1038/s41562-022-01333-7

Cited by 39 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…(p. 452)In response to this crisis, Bennett (2021) envisions a reimagining of the power structures that are often tacit in academic psychology, naming the epistemological assumptions embedded in research hierarchies, and advocating for a revision in the professional development incentive structure. As scholars and as editors, we have championed open science efforts (e.g., Adler, 2022; Wright et al, 2021) and, given the traction these efforts have already had in our field, we agree with Grigoropoulou and Small (2022) that “the data revolution in social science needs qualitative research” (p. 904). Yet Bennett's (2021) concerns about the risks of open science's ascendance have also simmered for us and offer a perspective we wanted to elevate in introducing our Special Issue, even as we pursued open science in constructing the issue.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 78%

Psychobiographies of social change agents: Introduction to the Special Issue

Adler

Singer

2022

Journal of Personality

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This Special Issue of Journal of Personality, focused on psychobiographies of social change agents, aims to make contributions to the field in terms of content, method, and process. The content of the issue is focused on understanding people who powerfully impact their world, from eminent global leaders to everyday change agents. The contributions to the Special Issue are unified by their adoption of psychobiographical methods, though as a set they offer both excellent representations of common psychobiographical approaches as well as vital innovations in this tradition. The process of curating this Special Issue sought to make several interventions in typical practices, including the cultivation of an intentional community of scholars representing both experienced and fledgling psychobiographers, the pursuit of a relational approach to publishing, and the adoption of open science practices. Psychobiography has an important role to play in contemporary personality psychology and we hope this Special Issue will itself serve as a foundation for continued innovation in the field.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 78%

Psychobiographies of social change agents: Introduction to the Special Issue

Adler

Singer

2022

Journal of Personality

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“…This group includes oligarchs, defined as ultra-wealthy people who use their fortunes to exert a disproportionate influence on politics-domestic and international. By building on in-depth ethnography with network analysis using "big data" from offshore leaks, our investigation answers recent calls to leverage synergies between qualitative and quantitative research [24].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…Our analysis of these "oligarch networks" provides the first quantitative test of two key implications from prior ethnographic research [24] on the offshore fortunes of high-net-worth individuals. This group includes oligarchs, defined as ultra-wealthy people who use their fortunes to exert a disproportionate influence on politics-domestic and international.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Complex Systems of Secrecy: The Offshore Networks of Oligarchs

Chang¹,

Harrington²,

Fu³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Following the invasion of Ukraine, the US, UK, and EU governments--among others--sanctioned oligarchs close to Putin. This approach has come under scrutiny, as evidence has emerged of the oligarchs' successful evasion of these punishments. To address this problem, we analyze the role of an overlooked but highly influential group: the secretive professional intermediaries who create and administer the oligarchs' offshore financial empires. Drawing on the Offshore Leaks Database provided by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), we examine the ties linking offshore expert advisors (lawyers, accountants, and other wealth management professionals) to ultra-high-net-worth individuals from four countries: Russia, China, the United States, and Hong Kong. We find that resulting nation-level “oligarch networks” share a scale-free structure characterized by a heterogeneity of heavy-tailed degree distributions of wealth managers; however, network topologies diverge across clients from democratic versus autocratic regimes. While generally robust, scale-free networks are fragile when targeted by attacks on highly-connected nodes. Our “knock-out” experiments pinpoint this vulnerability to the small group of wealth managers themselves, suggesting that sanctioning these professional intermediaries may be more effective and efficient in disrupting dark finance flows than sanctions on their wealthy clients. This vulnerability is especially pronounced amongst Russian oligarchs, who concentrate their offshore business in a handful of boutique wealth management firms. The distinctive patterns we identify suggest a new approach to sanctions, focused on expert intermediaries to disrupt the finances and alliances of their wealthy clients. More generally, our research contributes to the larger body of work on complexity science and the structures of secrecy.

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“…Harnessing techniques for data reduction and pattern recognition, this scholarship leverages computational models as means for generating “insight[s] about what to look for in the data and how to theorize what is being observed”. (Baden et al 2021; Grigoropoulou and Small 2022). Arguably most prominent among these, the program of computational grounded theory (CGT) developed by Laura K Nelson (2020) and the framework of computational ethnography proposed by Corey Abramson et al (2018) demonstrate the exceptional payoffs of this strategy, tying the rigorous study of digital textual data to fine-grained qualitative explorations of patterns, mechanisms, and causality (Edelmann et al 2020; Karell and Freedman 2019; Nelson 2020, 2021a, 2021b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Extended Computational Case Method: A Framework for Research Design

Pardo-Guerra

Pahwa

2022

Sociological Methods & Research

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This paper considers the adoption of computational techniques within research designs modeled after the extended case method. Echoing calls to augment the power of contemporary researchers through the adoption of computational text analysis methods, we offer a framework for thinking about how such techniques can be integrated into quasi-ethnographic workflows to address broad, structural sociological claims. We focus, in particular, on how this adoption of novel forms of evidence impacts corpus design and interpretation (which we tie to matters of casing), theoretical elaboration (which we associate to moving empirical claims across scales and empirical domains), and verification (which we see as a process of reflexive scaffolding of theoretical claims). We provide an example of the use of this framework through a study of the marketization of social scientific knowledge in the United Kingdom.

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The data revolution in social science needs qualitative research

Cited by 39 publications

References 12 publications

Psychobiographies of social change agents: Introduction to the Special Issue

Psychobiographies of social change agents: Introduction to the Special Issue

Complex Systems of Secrecy: The Offshore Networks of Oligarchs

The Extended Computational Case Method: A Framework for Research Design

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