Types of big data and designs of evaluation research

The use of big data can represent a valuable way to inspire decision making at all level of public administration and governments in a time of scarce resources. Nevertheless, new digital data have not deployed their potential in the public arena as they did in the corporations. One reason is that there is still little knowledge about what kind of data can be usefully managed, at what policy level they are really demanded, how they are collected, organized, integrated and interrogated, by whom and for what purposes. There is therefore the need to show how to apply big data to policy evaluation and research. According to a typology of big data (Aragona, 2016) five examples of big data research are presented, in order to show some principal opportunities and challenges that these data offer to policy making and evaluation.