Some further reflections on the coming crisis of empirical sociology

We respond to the two comments on our article ‘The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology ’ from Rosemary Crompton (2008) and Richard Webber (2009) which have been published in Sociology, as well as issues arising from the wider debate generated by our article. We urge sociologists to recognize the gravity of the chal-lenges posed by the proliferation of social data and to become more vociferous in contributing to political debates over method and data