Introduction to the Special Issue-Social Media and Inquiry into Political Change-Collaborative Approaches to Confirmatory and Exploratory Research in the Digital Age

The three papers presented in this special issue address social media from a variety of perspectives. L suggest the reader to take heed from these papers that the exploratory tradition is now seeing a revival among the younger generation of scholars, and that more deliberation and effort is required to go beyond the confirmatory stage. Exploration should precede confirmation; the formation of theory should be built upon both solid reasoning and exploratory efforts. Positivists will benefit from this conceptualization and see that there is room for collaboration in this new era of social media and big data research.