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The Diffusion of e-Research: The Use and Non-Use of Advances in Information and Communication Technologies across the Social Sciences)
Dutton, William H.; Meyer, Eric T.
e-Social Science initiatives have been launched around the world, but we know relatively little about its impact on the social sciences. Who employs the tools of e-Social Science? Who is aware of national initiatives? There is a general perception that the social science community lacks a sufficient level of awareness, and that this has contributed to a low take-up of advances in information and communication technologies as tools for social research. This paper addresses this issue through an analysis of survey data collected in 2008. An online survey was designed and distributed to gauge the ways in which social scientists use software tools to enable research, and to measure attitudes and awareness of developments in e-Research. The survey was supported by a grant from the UK's Economic and Social Research Council and conducted through the Oxford e-Social Science project, a node of the UK's National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS), by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII). The survey was pre-tested in November 2007. From January to March 2008, the revised survey was distributed using two mechanisms. The first was a targeted mailing to a set of mailing lists obtained from NCeSS (n=643) and the OII contact database (n=2138). Individuals on these mailing lists were sent personalized invitations to the survey, with a follow-up request sent approximately two weeks after the initial request only to those subjects who had not yet completed the survey. The second distribution mechanism was a separate, generic version of the same survey that allowed anyone to take the survey. This generic version was distributed to a number of targeted mailing lists, including the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods newsletter, the NCeSS weekly and monthly newsletters, the Cybersociety Live mailing list, the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) mailing list, and the American Sociological Association Communication and Information Technologies (CITASA) listserv. Recipients were also asked to forward this request to other appropriate lists. The survey received {greater than 500} responses; approximately 85% of people who began the survey completed the survey instrument.
This paper reports the findings of this survey. Although the data are still being collected at the time of this submission, the data collection and analysis will have been completed in advance of the NCeSS conference. Among the topics we will discuss based on our data analysis are the use of e-research tools, such as the uptake of specific e-research tools in the social sciences. The analysis will enable us to address the extent to which researchers are engaging in collaborative research, and how this shapes their use of e-research. We will then be able to describe levels of awareness, and how these are related to patterns of uptake, methodological approaches, and disciplines. In addition, we will explore attitudes toward e-research across the social sciences, which could help shape initiatives aimed at supporting the diffusion of e-social sciences.
