Skills, availability, willingness, expected participation and burden of sharing visual data within the frame of web surveys

Abstract

Although there is literature on the willingness to share visual data in the frame of web surveys and the actual participation when asked to do so, no research has investigated the skills of the participants to create and share visual data and the availability of such data, along with the willingness to share them. Furthermore, information on the burden associated with answering conventional questions and performing visual data-related tasks is also scarce. Our paper aims to fill those gaps, considering images and videos, smartphones and PCs, and visual data created before and during the survey. Results from a survey conducted among internet users in Spain (N = 857) show that most respondents know how to perform the studied tasks on their smartphone, while a lower proportion knows how to do them on their PC. Also, respondents mainly store images of landscapes and activities on their smartphone, and their availability to create visual data during the survey is high when answering from home. Furthermore, more than half of the participants are willing to share visual data. When analyzing the three dimensions together, the highest expected participation is observed for visual data created during the survey with the smartphone, which also results in a lower perception of burden. Moreover, older and lower educated respondents are less likely to capture and share visual data. Overall, asking for visual data seems feasible especially when collected during the survey with the smartphone. However, researchers should reflect on whether the expected benefits outweigh the expected drawbacks on a case-by-case basis.

Protocol for a web survey experiment studying the feasibility of asking respondents to capture and submit photos of the books they have at home and the resulting data quality

“…Thus, we decided to limit the participation to respondents using smartphones and tablets, which allow for capturing photos more easily. This decision was supported by previous studies conducted with the same opt-in panel in Spain ( Netquest ), which have reported that smartphones are the primary device used by respondents to answer surveys ( e.g., 69% in Iglesias & Revilla, 2023 , or 64% among millennials in Bosch et al , 2019b ). In order to guarantee mobile-only participation, the survey was programmed such that if a participant tried to connect to the survey through a PC, the following message was shown: “This survey should be answered from a smartphone or tablet.…”

“…Answer from their main residence : Iglesias and Revilla (2023) found that the most limiting factor for sending images is related to the availability of the data. In particular, when asking for photos that must be captured during the survey, they found that between 17.1% and 33.7% of the respondents are not in a situation allowing them to take such photos.…”

“…Finally, it is worth mentioning that gender is one of the control variables to be used during the analyses since previous research suggests that differences might exist across genders ( Iglesias & Revilla, 2023 ). Gender was also considered in the design stage as it was used as a quota to get a sample similar to the target population in Spain (see section Sample for more details).…”

What is the best way of collecting data donations in an online survey? An experiment assessing the feasibility of different data donation approaches to measure mobile and app usage.

“…Although no experimental evidence directly compares these three approaches to data donation, prior research has employed images, videos, and enhanced recall to collect data in surveys (Bosch and Revilla, 2019;Iglesias and Revilla, 2023), including data donations, with varying degrees of success. Regarding screenshots, studies have reported donation rates ranging from 9% to 41.1% (Hodes and Thomas, 2020;Ohme et al, 2021;Gower and Moreno, 2018;Rosenthal et al, 2021).…”