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The future of ethnography in the Big Data era
By taking an ethnographic viewpoint, Beuving explores knowledge claims about Big Data (BD) as discussed in Seth Stephens-Davidowitz' best-selling book Everybody Lies (2017). It portrays BD in a way that evokes affinity with ethnography: as a naturalistic research practice that makes small subpopulations visible and discloses people's hidden motives. But for Beuving this threefold assertion appears to rest on misguided conceptions. For the ethnographic researcher, naturalism refers to a reflexive practice, yet the BD researcher associates it with researcher invisibility. And the term population, which has a statistical meaning in BD, has a strong theoretical connotation in ethnography. Finally, motives in BD are about direct interpretation of revealed preferences as social facts, whereas the ethnographer considers them to be expressions of social behavior that require a Verstehende interpretation.
Bosch sees the relation of ethnography and Big Data research as a new form of Methodenstreit, which urges qualitative researchers to develop and apply user-oriented analysis techniques. Gigengack stresses that ethnography and Big Data are in fact incompatible. They should not be seen as methodological rivals in understanding society and social conduct. Ethnography and Big Data analyses are different perspectives on the social world. Ethnography should study the world of Internet behavior as it studies religious rites or societal identities.

Reinoud Bosch en Roy Gigengack reiken beiden interessante gezichtspunten aan in reactie op mijn vraag naar de naturalistische kennisaanspraken van BD en de consequenties voor kwalitatief onderzoek/etnografie. Bosch omarmt, net als ikzelf, een meer filosofisch-pragmatisch perspectief waarin BD en etnografie prima naast elkaar kunnen bestaan. Daarbij is het vanzelfsprekend dat beide vanuit verschillende onderzoeksproblemen vertrekken: de statistische beschrijving van gedrag/sociale rollen versus het van binnenuit begrijpen daarvan. Zoals we betogen in ons boek (Beuving & De Vries, 2015), zijn beide nodig om samenlevingen te begrijpen: sociale feiten (Durkheim) en betekenissen (Thomas) zijn onderling afhankelijk. Het wederzijds afdwingen van een methodische benadering en conceptueel kader is dan uiteraard weinig vruchtbaar. De groeiende digitalisering van de samenleving verandert maar weinig aan de geldigheid van dat fundamentele sociaalwetenschappelijke principe, hoewel er wel praktische methodische consequenties zijn – een discussie die we eerder al weleens in KWALON voerden (bijv. Warmelink, Beuving & Wester, 2015).

An article based on the contribution or three authors. Former political secretary of the Flemish ecological party Green! Geysels remembers the main strategies at the start of the sanitary cordon in Belgium in 1989. After summing up the effects and impact of these statements, he defends the cordon as an instrument which helps to protect the bases of democracy. De Lange, in the second contribution, Right-populist political parties and sketches the academic outlines of the discussion. She warns against unilateral, unfounded and unwise propositions in the debate, certainly when it concerns translating the Belgian experience to the current Dutch situation. Professor Fennema, the third author, studied the forming of extreme Right parties in Europe and is president of the Center of Radicalism and Extremism Studies CRES. He writes of the Dutch experience with the sanitary cordon and its consequences on contemporary political debate in the Netherlands, which has changed into a debate in terms of fear and hate. All three authors emphasize that a comparison between the Flemish and Dutch experience falls: in Flanders, where the cordon functions since 20 years, no party was ever forbidden. In the Netherlands, where discussion on the sanitary cordon has been bled, that happened. O. van Zijl

Answer of author to the reactions on his article 'Typology construction: Between euphoria and empirical validity'
Answer of author to the reactions on his article 'Typology construction: Between euphoria and empirical validity'
Answer of author to the reactions on his article 'Typology construction: Between euphoria and empirical validity'

Op 22 en 23 april 2010 werd in Utrecht in het gebouw van de Universiteit voor Humanistiek het eerste internationale congres gehouden dat ooit door KWALON is georganiseerd. Initiator en hoofdorganisator Jeanine Evers had hiervoor een samenwerkingsverband ontwikkeld met onze Vlaamse zusterorganisatie KwalitatiefSterk, het Duitse Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Qualitative Social Research (Freie Universität Berlin) en het Britse CAQDAS networking project (University of Surrey). De conferentie werd bovendien ondersteund door de Universiteit van Humanistiek en DANS (KNAW).

In contrast to comparative economic studies concentrating on gross national & per capita income, a new approach is presented stressing per capita consumption. Personal expenditures are classified as primary (food, clothing, & shelter), secondary (education, transportation), & luxury. Data from Brazil, El Salvador, the Ivory Coast, Italy, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Portugal, Sierra Leone, South Korea, Tanzania, & the US are used to derive an index of consumption inequality, the validity of which is established by a cross-sectional design. 3 Tables, 3 Figures, 2 Appendixes, 22 References. M. Meeks

Being yourself when doing fieldwork
Being yourself when doing fieldwork
The author has done research on delinquent behavior of Moroccan boys by doing fieldwork among them. Making sure the group of Moroccan boys accepted him in their midst took some convincing, as the author is sure you will understand. How do you get a group that is hostile towards society and carries a stigma to accept a researcher and cooperate with the research? In this article the author will explain how he went about gaining their trust mostly by being himself and with a bit of luck.