Linking Twitter and Survey Data: The Impact of Survey Mode and Demographics on Consent Rates Across Three UK Studies

Abstract

In light of issues such as increasing unit nonresponse in surveys, several studies argue that social media sources such as Twitter can be used as a viable alternative. However, there are also a number of shortcomings with Twitter data such as questions about its representativeness of the wider population and the inability to validate whose data you are collecting. A useful way forward could be to combine survey and Twitter data to supplement and improve both. To do so, consent within a survey is first needed. This study explores the consent decisions in three large representative surveys of the adult British population to link Twitter data to survey responses and the impact that demographics and survey mode have on these outcomes. Findings suggest that consent rates for data linkage are relatively low, and this is in part mediated by mode, where face-to-face surveys have higher consent rates than web versions. These findings are important to understand the potential for linking Twitter and survey data but also to the consent literature generally.

The practical and ethical challenges in acquiring and sharing digital trace data: Negotiating public-private partnerships

“…Moreover, we assumed that starting from a sample of people who had already agreed to their browsing behavior being tracked would also lead to higher consent rates for linking additional social media data. This hope was, in fact, confirmed as we found much higher consent rates for the linking of social media data than other studies (such as, for example, Al Baghal et al, 2019). The research interest of our project is both methodological and substantive.…”

Linking Survey and Twitter Data: Informed Consent, Disclosure, Security, and Archiving

“…For a researcher looking to link survey and Twitter data, establishing informed consent is the most visible challenge (see Al Baghal et al, 2019), but the reality is that, even after informed consent has been given, there are a myriad of issues to be resolved concerning collection of the social media data, the environment in which the linkage can take place, what is and is not disclosive, and what can be archived privately and publicly for posterity, and how. Thus, the scope of this article is to explore what “good” ethical practice may look like in this context.…”

Integrating Survey Data and Digital Trace Data: Key Issues in Developing an Emerging Field

“…Two papers in this special issue contribute to the study of factors influencing informed consent to the collection of digital trace data. Both provide extensive information about how respondents were recruited into the collection of Twitter data (Al Baghal, Sloan, Jessop, Williams, & Burnap, 2019) and extensive sensor and usage data collected with an app for Android mobile devices (Kreuter et al, 2019). They use data from high-quality large-scale survey programs from the United Kingdom and Germany that were sampled using probabilistic methods, which is still the exception in research with digital trace data.…”

“…Especially when recruiting survey respondents for the tracking of social media data, the low consent rates are problematic. For example, Al Baghal, Sloan, Jessop, Williams, and Burnap (2019) report a Twitter penetration between 20% and 25% for Great Britain. With consent rates of 40%, only 10% of the net sample is available for data linking.…”