Digital Behavioral Data

What is digital behavioral data?

The concept of 'digital behavioral data' (DBD) encompasses digital observations of human and algorithmic behavior which are, amongst others, recorded by online platforms (like Google, Facebook, or the World Wide Web) or sensors (like smartphones, RFID sensors, satellites, or street view cameras). There are overlaps with concepts of  “big data” – with digital behavioral data often sharing their characteristics – or “digital trace data” – which are the basis for measuring digital behavior. “Digital behavioral data”, however, focus on the societally relevant aspects of human and algorithmic behavior and the research perspectives derived from this.

Why do we study digital behavioral data?

Digitization has changed our lives in almost every realm: may it be communication, work, learning and teaching, shopping, traveling, finding a job, a partner, or any piece of information. We all interact in and with socio-technical systems, in which algorithms have a decisive role. Thus, digital behavioral data has become a prime source for monitoring and analyzing the structural development of societies and the behavior of humans therein. With DBD we can approach well-known social science research questions with new forms of data, we can get hold of data in spaces that are left blank by traditional quantitative methods, and, most notably, we can study in vivo the major changes in the private and the public sphere digitization is bringing about.

Why does GESIS engage in this area?

Data standards in the social sciences are high, and digital behavioral data pose quite some challenges to individual scientists who want to integrate them into their research designs. To enable and further promote the use of DBD in social science research and beyond, reliable infrastructures for collecting, pre-processing, analyzing, and providing digital behavioral data are needed. GESIS is the largest infrastructure institution for the social sciences in Europe, is dedicated to data and has a strong record of working with digital behavioral data since 2013 when the institute's Computational Social Science Department was founded. From 2022 on – and thanks to additional funding from the Leibniz Association ("special purpose grant") – we have been able to expand this engagement across departments to become a major pillar of GESIS.