Sociology of public opinion and the Big Data challenge

Abstract

Big Data has become one of the factors that shook the legitimacy of the polling techniques being dominant in studying social reality. Facing the big data challenge, scholars have to answer the question about the nature of the data they used before. The basic characteristics of big data (3V - volume, velocity, variety) allow drawing up the mass behavior forecasting models more efficiently than the public opinion sociology does. Taken into account constant criticism over the forecasting based on public surveys, this feature makes Big Data more attractive for the research community. The article considers two strategies that the public opinion sociology can use in response to Big Data: criticism and search for vulnerabilities (D. Boyd, K. Crawford, J. Fan, H. Liu, D. Lazer, M. Wilson, L. Manovich), and collaboration (M. Kosinski, H. Ford, S. Bowman).