Authors:Angela Delli Paoli, Giuseppe Masullo First page: 617 Abstract: The digital transformation of social life should be accompanied by new forms of social enquiry. In particular, the digital would make possible new forms of understanding sociality that arise from the complex interactions between digital technology, social research and social life. It invades the micro, meso and macro areas and aspects of social life (citizenship, identity, gender and sexuality, power relations, inequalities, social networks social structures and institutions, politics and economics, to name but a few) and generates new practices, socialisation processes, ties and relationships, re-distributing power among institutional actors. Apart from skepticism or enthusiasm, the paper investigates the distinctive topics of digital social research, the nature of digital data, and the place for technological objects (devices, technology, robots, AI, algorithms, etc.), the digital biases (e.g. digital social desirability, digital discriminations, etc;), the methodological challenges and opportunities deriving from acquiring records of computer-mediated social interactions being them self-report on individual’s social network or digital traces left by individual’s online activities and the methodological principles which are not easily dismissed by the new availability of data. PubDate: 2022-07-11 DOI: 10.13136/isr.v12i7S.573 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 7S (2022)
Authors:Enrica Amaturo, Biagio Aragona, Cristiano Felaco First page: 635 Abstract: This paper offers an epistemological and theoretical framework, and a research agenda, to face the main ethical and social pitfalls of the deployment of big data and IoT in social domains (SIoT). We rely on the concept of critical optimism to explain epistemic orientation about the technological future, paying particular attention to the social challenges. The framework drives the creation of an agenda for social researchers that aids to detect more evidence on the SIoT opportunities. PubDate: 2022-07-11 DOI: 10.13136/isr.v12i7S.574 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 7S (2022)
Authors:Sonia Stefanizzi First page: 651 Abstract: Digital data have become so pervasive that they are the main resource used in scientific research, business and society. With reference to scientific research, a data-centric approach is emerging in all scientific disciplines. The article argues that data centrism does not mean the absence of theory. In fact, as will be shown, data are always produced in relation to and to precise expectations and conceptual schemes. Just as the algorithms that are used to analyze huge amounts of data are “material executors” of actions predetermined beforehand. A relevant aspect of data centrism is that the large amount of data available is closely linked to a revolution in the communication of research results that becomes Open Science. The link between Big Data and Open Data is, therefore, the true revolutionary contribution of data-centrism. In fact, the dissemination of data using open formats (Open Data) is able to provide new opportunities in terms of greater transparency on the part of the producers of the data. The data-centric approach allows us to tackle problems that in the past were considered difficult or impossible to analyze, it also raises other questions related to data quality and ethics such as the right to privacy, transparency in accessing public data, and fair treatment of predictive techniques. [...] PubDate: 2022-07-11 DOI: 10.13136/isr.v12i7S.575 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 7S (2022)
Authors:Cleto Corposanto, Beba Molinari First page: 665 Abstract: In this article the authors aim to present a series of considerations, regarding the research carried out in the last 8 years, which starting from Big Data have posed different methodological problems related on the one hand to sampling and on the other to the conception of error in the scientific field. More precisely, the contribution will be divided into two macro areas of discussion. In the first part we will discuss sampling, with particular attention to break-offs and drop-outs and the relative response and cooperation rates, in order to understand how much these rates can still be valid in web 2.0 contexts. But at the same time we should ask whether it still makes sense to speak of probability sampling when in the hard sciences only a few cases are used in experiments, often less than a hundred. Further reflections concern the determination of a statistical representativeness which, especially online, can sometimes be overcome by an effective sociological representativeness. The second part of the contribution will be devoted to the discussion regarding biases and how the error can bring a series of further complexities in a pandemic reality. In this regard, the authors are convinced that an interpretative turning point must be made in the discussion that takes place around the error considered in the “science of discovery”. PubDate: 2022-07-11 DOI: 10.13136/isr.v12i7S.576 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 7S (2022)
Authors:Antonio De Falco, Ciro Clemente De Falco, Marco Ferracci First page: 685 Abstract: In the data revolution era, new data and new sources allow researchers to find new ways to study society and its dynamics. Among these types of data, geo-located data enable better ways of producing social knowledge. The availability of data with geographic information put the spatial dimension – initially ignored in social media analysis – at the centre of the interest in digital and web studies. In addition, this data also makes it possible to address the representativeness of big data innovatively. For this reason, we explore the territorial distribution of geo-located tweets regarding some significant territorial socio-economic dimensions in Italy. Our main results show a concentration of users in specific macroareas, a direct proportionality between the size of the city and tweets number, and more users in the urban centre than in metropolitan suburbs. In conclusion, we try to identify the factors underlying these differences and their implications in terms of data analysis and representativeness of the results. PubDate: 2022-07-11 DOI: 10.13136/isr.v12i7S.577 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 7S (2022)
Authors:Anita Lavorgna, Lisa Sugiura First page: 709 Abstract: This contribution discusses a series of methodological, ethical, and ontological challenges encountered by the authors during a series of recent socio-criminological studies based on digital ethnography and investigating sensitive and emotive issues. Particularly, we will discuss the practical difficulties we encountered in navigating several increasingly blurred boundaries, such as those among: (1) the researchers’ private and public academic/personal selves online; (2) the shifting of the traditional power imbalances between the researcher and research participants; (3) concerns over impartiality in research; and (4) elements of ethnography and autoethnography becoming obfuscated. We consider these dilemmas in the context of the pervasiveness of digital technologies within contemporary social life, such that we as researchers are always simultaneously on and offline, with our studies at risk of becoming all-consuming and encroaching on all areas of our lives. We will see how these blurred boundaries entail an inescapable continuous negotiation of researcher identity and positionality, and some of their practical consequences. We aim to encourage further discussion about these novel challenges faced whilst undertaking online research, and re-examination of the related ethical principles regarding these contexts. PubDate: 2022-07-11 DOI: 10.13136/isr.v12i7S.578 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 7S (2022)
Authors:Angela Delli Paoli First page: 729 Abstract: In this paper we investigate the potential of digital research when the digital is both the topic and the instrument of research. The digital is an interesting topic of social research when technology intersect society, that is in those fields where technology give new rise to some social issues directly impacting mainstream social problems (such as identity and sexuality). In the case of sexuality, for example, the digital offers discursive spaces to legitimate sexual minorities identities, especially when their sexual models do not conform to social norms. For these topics digital ethnography may be a distinctive method to study social change deriving from the digital. It seems to be particularly appropriate to study phenomena born digital and to investigate generative and productive (and not just reflective) digital identities and cultures avoiding the contrived situation of an interviewer asking people direct questions and allowing to document the performative use of language. In other words, it gives access to sensitive topics and hidden population which would otherwise be less visible. [...] PubDate: 2022-07-11 DOI: 10.13136/isr.v12i7S.579 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 7S (2022)
Authors:Laura Caroleo, Giuseppe Maiello First page: 749 Abstract: Modern societies have been strongly influenced by the development of digital media, which has facilitated not only the transmission of information and symbolic content, but also the creation of new forms of action, interaction, and social relations. The pervasiveness of digitization increased between 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to the lockdown of the entire world population and moved sociality predominantly online. The year 2020 also saw the emergence of a new social media platform called Clubhouse, which was based entirely on oral communication. The “global village” is recovering what Walter Ong calls secondary orality, which is typical of electronic media in literate societies, characterized by the recovery of speech in electronic form. Today, the development of technologies has introduced what Derrick de Kerckhove calls tertiary orality. The objective of this article is to follow the re-emergence of oral cultures as a new mode of online communication, focusing on the Italian community and the divergence between different groups of users strictly associated with polarization in highly propagandistic discourse. PubDate: 2022-07-11 DOI: 10.13136/isr.v12i7S.580 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 7S (2022)
Authors:Nicola Capolupo, Gianmaria Bottoni First page: 771 Abstract: The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically altered the way organizations work, as well as technologies, skills and knowledge required to adopt these new disruptive methodologies. While firms have found themselves prepared to cope with this need because more sensitive to their employee’s digital competences, this considerably differs for public organizations, where turnover and professional trainings are often delayed or non-existent. These difficulties particularly occur in communication sector, where professionals must keep up with several threats in an unstable scenario. The role played by digital techniques in this critical period has brought new forms of knowledge exchange among both professionals and scholars, spurring new methods of inquiry in qualitative and exploratory research. The aim of this article is to investigates which are the new digital communication skills required to professionals in public organizations, and what issues arise in acquiring or applying them during the working daily life. To meet this goal, a digital focus group on Microsoft Teams among professional communicators from public organizations was carried out. The findings of the focus group have been discussed to address a twofold need: mapping hard and soft skills of digital communicators in Public Administration; evaluate the relevance of virtual focus groups in organizational studies within the pandemic scenario. PubDate: 2022-07-11 DOI: 10.13136/isr.v12i7S.581 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 7S (2022)
Authors:Gabriella Punziano, Federico Esposito, Giuseppe Michele Padricelli First page: 801 Abstract: In the middle of an era characterized by continuous electoral campaigns and by the personalization of politics contained in the better-known platform society, our paper aims to shed light on the planning dynamics and practices carried out inside and outside the Net by those political actors in charge of the local election arena. Which factors related to political networks push individuals to run for a political position' What are the biographies, cultural and local relations of the territories they run for' What are the differences between political competitors in terms of the digital competence needed for campaign communication and promotion' The research design focuses on a specific case study shaped on the last local election in Naples. Through the study of the political biographies of the candidates, a framework analysis was conducted on press releases, aiming to understand the inferred narration of the election and a content analysis conducted on their official social media sources to comprehend the self-building political narratives of the observed candidates. This study aims to create a clear categorization of candidates, to understand the current digital customs adopted by political actors to draw and define their own political strategies. PubDate: 2022-07-11 DOI: 10.13136/isr.v12i7S.582 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 7S (2022)
Authors:Gabriella Punziano First page: 839 Abstract: The aim of this article is to introduce content analysis in the field of social research on tourism. Among other techniques, content analysis has undergone a revitalisation and acceleration in recent years, especially following a process of digitalisation and the spread of blogs, websites, social media, online reviews and digital spaces in which it is possible to comment, release content and express one’s own opinion, making the information available directly on the web increasingly numerous. On the basis of these premises, the aim of this article is to provide the reader with a definition of the technique by tracing, some specificities and useful characteristics. Subsequently, it will outline the difference between the quantitative and qualitative approaches to content analysis by examining the digital scenario and its particularities, especially the kind of digital data of which it makes use. Finally, it will offer a practical example of its application to the analysis of tourism narratives in digital spaces, centred on Quartieri Spagnoli in Naples. The example will be used in order to show how this technique could be a solution for specific cognitive objectives that are increasingly fitting in the production of tourism studies which adopt digital data in even more articulated designs that may involve a combination of different techniques. PubDate: 2022-07-11 DOI: 10.13136/isr.v12i7S.583 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 7S (2022)
Authors:Marianna Coppola First page: 865 Abstract: The interest in the analysis and study of the phenomenon of withdrawal and processes of “disappearance” from social life face-to-face has grown significantly in recent years both in clinical and in anthropological and sociological fields. The Hikikomori, a phenomenon of voluntary social self-exclusion exploded in Japan in the late nineties of last century, has gradually affected, albeit in different ways, all Western societies coming to become in a few years a real social and health emergency (Ricci, 2009; Saito, 2013). However, recent studies have shown that, although in Japanese society it is considered a social pathology expressly linked to double knit to the supporting structures of Japanese society and its way of understanding the commitment and social confrontation, in Western hybrid forms is considered, instead, an individual condition and in some cases a real psychological-relational structure, imposing a broader reflection on the causes, motivations and coping strategies experienced and implemented by young people who call themselves Hikikomori (Teo, 2015; Bagnato, 2017). The present research aims to analyze, with an avalutative and depathologizing position, the emotional-relational aspects and the processes and ways of socialization of young Italian Hikikomori through the netnographic analysis of the most important online community of Hikikomori in Italy [...] PubDate: 2022-07-11 DOI: 10.13136/isr.v12i7S.584 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 7S (2022)
Authors:Salvatore Monaco First page: 881 Abstract: Italian sociological studies exploring parenting in challenging circumstances from material, cultural, or relational perspectives are still few. Therefore, in 2019, the national interest project Constructions of Parenting on Insecure Grounds (CoPInG) was launched with the aim of analyzing the construction of parenthood and practices of “doing family” in uncertain circumstances. It is a qualitative study, which, using the grounded theory approach, aims to give voice and visibility to some of the most vulnerable parent groups (for example, parents living in poverty and precarious economic conditions; parents with forced migration backgrounds; gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans parents; and parents facing violent conflicts). The advent of COVID-19 upset the initial research design of the CoPInG project, making it even more difficult to recruit Italian parents and carry out the scheduled interviews. In this scenario, the research group identified and adopted alternative solutions to continue the project regardless. This paper examines the impact of digital technology on research that was originally designed to be offline, focusing in particular both on the possibilities offered by new communication channels to intercept vulnerable subjects and on strategies to be implemented to conduct the foreseen interviews. Thus, the global aim of this work is to introduce a series of critical reflections on digital innovations in social research on parenting in Italy [...] PubDate: 2022-07-11 DOI: 10.13136/isr.v12i7S.585 Issue No:Vol. 12, No. 7S (2022)
Open Access journal
