Bulletin of Sociological Methodology 158 (2023), 1

“Social’, ‘research’, ‘data’ and ‘analysis’: if we had wanted to choose our own words to describe what the BMS is about, we would probably not have done otherwise. For that is what we aim to publish in this journal, which Karl van Meter entrusted to us five years ago: articles in which our colleagues report on the way they construct and analyse data in order to better question what is at stake in the social world. And to do this, as this word cloud indicates, all methods are good: qualitative, quantitative, mixed, through observation, questionnaires – standardised or not – or by collecting data that are already there, which have become increasingly digitalised. Whatever the methods, all paths lead to a renewed questioning of the world around us, as long as reflexivity lights the way and, one might add, that the road is paved with a minimal form of comparison, primary or secondary.