Novel and Controversial Methods in the Social Sciences: Introduction to Special Issue

Editing this special issue of Society and Natural Resources was especially challenging, as it forced us to grapple with the ways we – as editors, reviewers, and scholars – read, interpret, and ultimately evaluate the scientific endeavors engaged in by our colleagues. We suggest that social scientist...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Society & natural resources 2019-10, Vol.32 (10), p.1077-1079
Main Authors: Floress, Kristin, Sachdeva, Sonya
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Community based action research
Community participation
Crowdsourcing
Data collection
Digital media
Editing
Ethnography
Internet
Mail surveys
Natural resources
Participatory research
Qualitative analysis
Recruitment
Research methodology
Scientific method
Scientists
Social media
Social sciences
Subsets
User generated content
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Summary:Editing this special issue of Society and Natural Resources was especially challenging, as it forced us to grapple with the ways we – as editors, reviewers, and scholars – read, interpret, and ultimately evaluate the scientific endeavors engaged in by our colleagues. We suggest that social scientists are now living in an era of comparative ease with regard to accumulating quantitative and qualitative data from human participants, though, as Stedman et al. point out in this issue, perhaps not via mail surveys. Not only do we now have easier ways of reaching human participants across the globe using online crowdsourcing platforms, we also have many institutions specializing in recruiting representative survey samples across seemingly limitless population subsets. Furthermore, online user generated content from social media sites, discussion forums, blogs and specialized web-based applications allow social scientists to reach and study people where they are, more conveniently than ever before. Yet, this does not diminish the need for or significance of smaller-scale case studies or methodologies like ethnography or community-based participatory research. Such approaches may become even more important for demonstrating precisely the gaps in our knowledge generated by more technologically – not necessarily methodologically – innovative data collection sources.Our intent in this issue is to bring greater exposure to promising methodologies that are being tested, have been tested but are not yet widely accepted across disciplines, or are being tested for applicability in other contexts.
ISSN:0894-1920
1521-0723
DOI:10.1080/08941920.2019.1627731