VIRTUAL SPACE AS A SOURCE OF PRIMARY SOCIAL INFORMATION

Abstract

The rapid development of the Internet has had an unprecedented impact on the improvement of the sociological method. At the turn of the millennium, this has led to the search for a new methodology and a gradual loss of interest to use of quantitative methods, which was perceived by specialists as a "crisis of empirical sociology". In the last decade, it turned out that almost all social processes of any level find their reflection in the virtual space, leave and accumulate so-called "digital footprints", which opens to researchers the widest perspectives for study of social reality. This article considers the features of digital primary information and generalized approaches to its use in terms of quantitative methodology. The author emphasizes that the classical sociological methods, which are based on mathematical statistics, are suitable for the analysis of digital reality and getting adequate research results. At the same time, as noted by most authors, who have studied this subject, there are perspectives for improving traditional sociological methods through: 1) a combination of representativeness of quantitative and depth of qualitative approaches to information analysis; 2) in-depth collection of paradata; 3) opportunities to study hard-to-reach social groups; 4) opportunities to fully implement the "principle of freedom from evaluation" due to the "non-reactivity" of digital data; 5) the ordering of digital footprints in space and time by clearly fixing the hosting. The post-demographic model of the social actor opens new ways to build samples of quantitative sociological research, which may be representative in terms of the classical sociological approach. The examples of research from this article show that the classical sociological method easily to adapt for the new digital reality and can be the basis for sociological consulting, development of social technologies in various spheres of social life.