Vast swathes of our social interactions and personal behaviours are now conducted online and/or captured digitally. In addition to common sources such as social media/network platforms and text corpora, websites and online databases contain rich information of relevance to social science research. Thus, computational methods for collecting data from websites are an increasingly important component of a social scientist’s toolkit.
This free webinar, organised by the UK Data Service, is the first in a series of three on how to collect data from websites using computational methods. Specifically, this webinar demonstrates the research potential of web-scraping by describing its role in generating a linked administrative dataset to study the causal effect of a regulatory intervention in the UK charity sector. Presented by Dr Diarmuid McDonnell of the UK Data Service, this webinar will cover the process of scraping data about charities, practical and ethical implications, and the advantages and disadvantages of using this form of data for social science research more generally.
