Samenvatting

This chapter presents an overview of the developments and potentials of mobile technologies and their major impact on society and the daily activities of individuals. The increase of sensors embedded in everyday objects enable these objects to sense the environment and communicate. This creates new possibilities to gather and process large amounts of data. We show how these opportunities can trigger a paradigm shift in the social sciences. Social scientists no longer collect data but use data that is available and collected for other reasons. These data will vary in validity and quality. It can come from sensors in personal mobile devices, smart environments, or social infrastructures. This asks a strong interpretive approach from multimethod- and mixed methods researches to harness these data.