ABSTRACT
Beyond the business world, the Big Data revolution is also transforming social science. This chapter provides three goals. The first is to describe the ways in which Big Data is transforming the social sciences. Big Data is changing not only the ways social scientists gather and analyze data, even the way they design their studies. The second goal of the chapter is to discuss some of the opportunities Big Data affords social scientists. Finally, the third goal of the chapter is to describe the new set of challenges that Big Data has created for social scientists and how may go about overcoming them. The Big Data approach is nothing without data sources. Some of the most popular data sources are social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Web search records like Google Trends, and mobile devices. Big Data research is poised to facilitate a revolution in psychological research.
