New data in social and behavioral research

A decade ago, in this journal’s 75th anniversary special issue, Groves (2011) called for the survey research community to collectively assess the role of what he called “organic” data in scientifically measuring social phenomena. What distinguishes these new potential sources of data–also called “found” (Taylor 2013) or “ready-made” (Salganik 2018)–is that they are not elicited by researchers, but rather are continuously generated by ongoing, everyday processes that happen independently of social researchers, who then repurpose the data to address social research questions.The idea that exploiting such new data sources will revolutionize social and behavioral research has generated both excitement (e.g., Savage and Burrows 2009; Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013; Golder and Macy 2014; Ceron, Curini, and Iacus 2015) and skepticism (e.g., Smith 2013; Couper 2013; Jungherr, Jürgens, and Schoen 2012). The past decade has seen a proliferation of substantive and methodological research across a range of disciplines and in a range of venues using new data sources and exploring their potential confluence with traditional data (see, e.g., Eck et al. 2019; Edgerly and Thorson 2020; Hill et al. 2021, among many others).