The Promises and Pitfalls of New Technologies for Qualitative Research

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)

Description

The past several years have seen a surge of interest in how emerging technologies are reshaping qualitative research, not only through advances in artificial intelligence but also through broader transformations in digital infrastructures that affect how data are generated, collected, and interpreted. This session brings together papers that examine how these technologies are becoming embedded across the entire research process, from fieldwork and data collection to transcription, coding, and analysis. The panel considers how digital tools are expanding the spatial and temporal reach of qualitative inquiry, enabling new forms of remote and hybrid research, and introducing novel sources of data such as digital traces, audiovisual materials, and large-scale text corpora. The panel critically assesses the implications of automation and AI-assisted workflows for interpretive practice, including questions of accuracy, bias, transparency, and the redistribution of analytic labor between researchers and computational systems. Rather than focusing solely on efficiency gains, this session highlights how these developments are reconfiguring core methodological assumptions, raising new epistemological challenges, and prompting renewed reflection on the role of human judgment in qualitative analysis.

Sub Unit

• Methodology Section / The Promises and Pitfalls of New Technologies for Qualitative Research

Presider

• Tamara Pavasovic Trost, University of Ljubljana

Individual Presentations

• Qualitative Methods in the Digital Era: How computation entangles fieldwork? - Livio Silva Silva-Muller, Harvard University

• A Framework for Computational Ethnography - Vivek Ramakrishnan, University of California-Los Angeles

• A Validation Framework for Automated Transcription in Social Science - Anna Seo Gyeong Choi, Cornell University; AJ Alvero, Cornell University; Allison Koenecke, Cornell University

• The Wealth of Funding Networks: Choosing and Constructing AI Platforms for Qualitative Analysis - Joshua Eisenstat, New York University

Session Organizer

• Tamara Pavasovic Trost, University of Ljubljana