In surveys, attempts are increasingly made to link survey data with register, geospatial and/or social media data on an individual level. Usually, this requires informed consent to the data linkage. Respondents must agree to the linking of their survey answers to other datasets, and researchers are obligated to inform them sufficiently. In contrast to other countries, few attempts at obtaining informed consent for record linkage are available for Austria. Therefore, this pilot study investigated hypothetical willingness to consent to data linkage in the Austrian case. Respondents were asked whether they would agree to four different data linkage requests: two addressed …

Linking survey responses with administrative data is a promising practice to increase the range of research questions to be explored, at a limited interview burden, both for respondents and interviewers. We describe the protocol for asking consent to data linkage on nine different sources in a large-scale nationally representative longitudinal survey of young adults in England: the Next Steps Age 25 Survey. We present empirical evidence on consent to data linkage from qualitative interviews, a pilot study, and the mainstage survey. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that discusses the practicalities of implementing a data …

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 …