Experiments in asking for informed consent to data linkage in general population studies 1 |
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| Coordinator 1 | Dr Jonathan Burton (Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex) |
| Coordinator 2 | Professor Annette Jackle (Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex) |
Linking survey and administrative data offers the possibility of combining the strengths, and mitigating the weaknesses, of both. Such linkage is therefore an extremely promising basis for future empirical research in social science. For ethical and legal reasons, linking administrative data to survey responses will usually require obtaining explicit consent. It is well known that not all respondents give consent. Past research on consent has generated many null and inconsistent findings. A weakness of the existing literature is that little effort has been made to understand the cognitive processes of how respondents make the decision whether or not to consent. The overall aim of this session is to improve our understanding about how to pursue the twin goals of maximizing consent and ensuring that consent is genuinely informed.
We welcome papers which employ an experimental design to:
1. Understand how respondents process requests for data linkage: which factors influence their understanding of data linkage, which factors influence their decision to consent, and to open the black box of consent decisions to begin to understand how respondents make the decision.
2. Develop and test methods of maximising consent in web surveys, by understanding why web respondents are less likely to give consent than face-to-face respondents.
3. Develop and test methods of maximising consent with requests for linkage to multiple data sets, by understanding how respondents process multiple requests.
4. Test the effects of different approaches to wording consent questions on informed consent.