Web Scraping: A Useful Tool to Broaden and Extend Psychological Research

Speckmann, Felix

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%T Web Scraping: A Useful Tool to Broaden and Extend Psychological Research
%A Speckmann, Felix
%J Zeitschrift für Psychologie
%N 4
%P 241-244
%V 229
%D 2021
%K Politbarometer 1977-2019 (Partielle Kumulation) (ZA2391 v12.0.0); web scraping; Big Data; internet research ethics
%@ 2151-2604
%~ FDB
%> https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-84582-6
%X When people use the Internet, they leave traces of their activities: blog posts, comments, articles, social media posts, etc. These traces represent behavior that psychologists can analyze. A method that makes downloading those sometimes very large datasets feasible is web scraping, which involves writing a program to automatically download specific parts of a website. The obtained data can be used to exploratorily generate new hypotheses, test existing ones, or extend existing research. The present Research Spotlight explains web scraping and discusses the possibilities, limitations as well as ethical and legal challenges associated with the approach.
%C DEU
%G en
%9 Zeitschriftenartikel
%W GESIS - http://www.gesis.org
%~ SSOAR - http://www.ssoar.info