Qualitative Big Data’s Challenges and Solutions

Digitalization of everyday lives has tremendously increased the amount of digital (trace) data of people’s behaviour available for researchers. However, traditional qualitative research methods struggle with the width and breadth of the data. This paper reviewed 61 recent studies that had utilized qualitative big data for the practical challenges they had encountered and how they were addressed. While quantitative and qualitative big data share many common issues, the review points at that lack of qualitative methods and dataset reduction required by algorithms in big data research decreases the richness of the qualitative data. Locating relevant data and reducing noise are further challenges. Currently, these challenges can be only partially addressed with a combination of human and computer pattern recognition and crowdsourcing. The review describes many “tricks of the trade” but abduction research and pragmatist philosophy seem promising starting places for a more pervasive framework.Peer reviewe