Understanding and improving data linkage consent in surveys

Published online: 2 February 2021Linking 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.1 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 project was to improve our understanding about how to pursue the twin goals of maximizing consent and ensuring that consent is genuinely informed. The ultimate objective is to strengthen the data infrastructure for social science and policy research in the UK. Specific aims were: 1. To 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. To 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. To develop and test methods of maximising consent with requests for linkage to multiple data sets, by understanding how respondents process multiple requests. 4. As a by-product of testing hypotheses about the previous points, to test the effects of different approaches to wording consent questions on informed consent