Funding: Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Duration of the project: September 1, 2022 – August 31, 2027
Summary of the project
Since the digital revolution, an increasingly significant part of people's lives has been taking place in the online space. For this reason, the digitization of society has led social science research towards new areas and new challenges. On the one hand, the digital space reflects the social inequalities that exist in the offline space, while on the other hand, it creates new divides between social groups. However, even the theoretical models that sociologists have developed in great depth and detail over the past decades on social stratification, which also include the dimensions of the digital world, are mostly based on data collected through questionnaires. However, self-reported surveys are only able to capture these digital inequalities to a limited extent, as they are more suited to measuring attitudes than behaviour. A more suitable method for measuring the mentioned digital differences may be to observe people's digital behaviour. In addition to our online presence, digitalisation has also generated new types of data about our offline lives. Our daily activities, such as the location, time, and duration of our phone calls or our credit card spending, are recorded every second. Data derived from observing digital behaviour and generated by digitalisation can help us expand or refine our knowledge of the structure and functioning of society. The research aims to (1) create models that can estimate social class based solely on people's digital footprints, focusing on the differences in digital behavior between social groups defined by classical social structure theories, and (2) reveal new dimensions of social structure in the online space in the online space that could be used to expand existing theories or even establish new theories of social stratification, and (3) to use digital surveillance data to expand our knowledge of the inequalities between different strata of society.