Explaining Change with Digital Trace Data: A Framework for Temporal Bracketing

Abstract

Digital trace data, along with computational techniques to analyze them, provide novel means to study how organizational phenomena change over time. Yet, as digital traces typically lack context, it is challenging to explain why and how such changes take place. In this paper, we discuss temporal bracketing as an approach to integrate context into digital trace data-based research. We conceptualize a framework to apply temporal bracketing in the analysis of digital trace data. We showcase our framework on the grounds of data from an onboarding process of a financial institution in Central Europe. We point to several implications for computationally intensive theory development around change with digital trace data.