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Obtaining Record Linkage Consent: Results from a Wording Experiment in Germany
[journal article]
Abstract Many sample surveys ask respondents for consent to link their survey information with
administrative sources. There is significant variation in how linkage requests are
administered and little experimental evidence to suggest which approaches are useful for
achieving high consent rates. A common ... view more
Many sample surveys ask respondents for consent to link their survey information with
administrative sources. There is significant variation in how linkage requests are
administered and little experimental evidence to suggest which approaches are useful for
achieving high consent rates. A common approach is to emphasize the positive benefits of
linkage to respondents. However, some evidence suggests that emphasizing the negative
consequences of not consenting to linkage is a more effective strategy. To further examine
this issue, we conducted a gain-loss framing experiment in which we emphasized the benefit
(gain) of linking or the negative consequence (loss) of not linking one’s data as it related to
the usefulness of their survey responses. In addition, we explored a sunk-prospective costs
rationale by varying the emphasis on response usefulness for responses that the respondent
had already provided prior to the linkage request (sunk costs) and responses that would be
provided after the linkage request (prospective costs). We found a significant interaction
between gain-loss framing and the sunk-prospective costs rationale: respondents in the
gain-framing condition consented to linkage at a higher rate than those in the loss-framing
condition when response usefulness was emphasized for responses to subsequent survey
items. Conversely, the opposite pattern was observed when response usefulness was
emphasized for responses that had already been provided: loss-framing resulted in a higher
consent rate than the gain-framing, but this result did not reach statistical significance.... view less
Keywords
Federal Republic of Germany; survey research; survey; response behavior; data organization; personal data; data capture; official statistics; social data; experiment
Classification
Methods and Techniques of Data Collection and Data Analysis, Statistical Methods, Computer Methods
Document language
English
Publication Year
2015
Page/Pages
12 p.
Journal
Survey Methods: Insights from the Field (2015)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.13094/SMIF-2015-00012
ISSN
2296-4754
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed
Licence
Creative Commons - Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works