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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we focus on the concept of critical optimism, a concept that has served many authors to explain orientation about the future. It means to be neither mechanistic in our imagination of the world nor naïve about the expectations the future can hold. Recently scholars have appealed to critical optimism to explain how we should relate to the digital, since when facing technology often, also in the scientific literature, we find extreme opinions. After ten years that the debate around technology and social research has developed on these two opposite visions, we promote an active engagement in testing the different instruments of digital research. Digital methods and big data must be integrated with traditional data sources and methods already existing in social sciences, and that is the right way to effectively improve the unfolding of social phenomena. In support of this thesis, we want to bring two examples that can demonstrate how the use of digital technologies did not lead to abandoning the traditional techniques of social research, but it instead has contributed to solving some problems in the use of these techniques, which before digital were hard to solve. Here, we will illustrate just two examples, the survey and the experiment, that relate to quantitative research, although certainly there are others that can be retraced in quantitative as well as qualitative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The attention paid to the impact of big data and computation on the tool-kit of social scientists has not been matched by an equivalent interest in the many epistemological questions that these digital methods evoke. Here we propose a series of epistemological warnings about the limits of the scientific knowledge produced through digital methods, and we closely examine how these methods change the relationships between subject and object, data and theory, methods and data. In order to support an active commitment by social scientists to explore the digital dimension of social inquiry, it is critical to adopt a methodological posture that is able to elaborate research designs with and against the digital, trying to exploit what digital techniques can provide as an added value, while testing their reliability with regard to other techniques, including the qualitative ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights from the article: Digital data is the data voluntarily uploaded on social networks, blogs, and Tures in the data, without preliminary training data. Are now financing open-data infrastructures and inserting big data in the Alessandra Righi exploits social network data to measure migration flows.

Youth and Social Capital: The Religiosity Horizons · This paper aims to study the relationship between religion and social capital considering young people living in Naples. The article discusses how the combination of different levels of social capital and religiosity can help us to identify profiles of religiosity. Technique of multivariate analysis was used to reach these scopes. The results compare the level of conceptualisation and the level of religious practices detected in the profiles, allowing to highlight the continuity and discontinuity in practices, identification and positioning of the young people in the local sample with respect to religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to discuss the potential, the limits and the critical aspects of the survey research in the conceptual and analytical framework of Mixed Methods, considering the increasingly complex scenario of the digital age. In particular, the discussion is articulated on each of the elements of the survey approach, with specific examples of research, adding to the contribution of the integrated approach to the renewal of the survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illustrates the main results of a one year ethnographic research about three typical handmade productions in the historical centre of Naples: lute making, jewellery, and nativity scene (called "presepe") making. Neapolitan artistic craftsmanship, most known maybe just for the 3 investigated productions, constitutes a local resource and a development opportunity, which represents the continuity with tradition but also the capacity of innovation. The craftsmen recover and adequate techniques of cultured art, reinterpreting contents and techniques of traditional productions, while differentiating the product and its quality on the basis on the new requests of the customers. They also have introduced new technologies in the traditional production processes, and changes both in the work organisation and in the transmission of craft. The collected information permit to identify the potential, the richness and variety of forms of a field that, though still bound with tradition, has undergone many changes and still tries to innovate every day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sociologia Italiana is the property of EGEA S.p.A and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Sociologia del Lavoro is the property of FrancoAngeli srl and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)