ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 provides a comprehensive overview of the wide array of data sources available to contemporary researchers, ranging from traditional methods to novel digital streams. It discusses traditional data foundations like surveys and administrative records, noting their reliability and structured nature, as well as their limitations in scope and timeliness. It then explores emerging sources: social media data, sensor and IoT outputs, crowdsourced information, and commercial transactional data, highlighting how these offer unprecedented volume and real-time insight but often come unstructured, with biases and privacy concerns. The chapter emphasizes that more data are not inherently better and urges researchers to critically assess each source’s representativeness and quality. Strategies for integrating multiple data sources are presented, illustrating that combining surveys with digital traces or other datasets can yield richer insights while balancing out individual limitations.
