In Data Paradoxes: The Politics of Intensified Data Sourcing in Contemporary Healthcare, Klaus Hoeyer examines the paradoxes surrounding healthcare data, looking at Denmark as a case study, arguing that increased data collection does not always result …
Category: data collection
We’re more and more aware of digital harms, but what is the digital good?
Research and media stories often highlight how digital technologies have had a negative impact on our lives. But what might it mean to set out a vision of the ‘digital good’? Director of a new ESRC-funded network focused on the digital good, Helen Kenn…
The vaccine passport debate reveals fundamental views about how personal data should be used, its role in reproducing inequalities, and the kind of society we want to live in
Helen Kennedy draws on evidence from the Living With Data survey to link public attitudes to data collection and use to views on Covid-19 vaccine passports. Finding widespread concern about the involvement of commercial technology companies in such ini…
More data or better data? Using statistical decision theory to guide data collection
When designing data collection, researchers must take important decisions on how much data to collect and what resources to devote to enhancing the quality of the collected data. But the threshold for choosing better over bigger data may be reached long before the sample numbers in the thousands, write Jeff Dominitz and Charles F. Manski. Big data has become an […]
Equal parts researcher and advocate: having an impact in hard-to-reach communities
Conducting fieldwork in hard-to-reach communities can pose significant challenges. Sarah G. Zawacki‘s research focuses on health in Roma migrant communities and to overcome participants’ initial wariness and mistrust she constructed a data collection strategy in which she was as much a community advocate as a researcher. It is through such active involvement with hard-to-reach communities, and by placing their impressions […]