Understanding and addressing its impact on digital data collection in surveys
Recent years have seen a growing interest in the concept of ‘digital trust’ as a fundamental component of the health of digital societies and their capacity to effectively exploit data for the common good. Digital Trust has been defined as “individuals’ expectation that digital technologies and services – and the organizations providing them – will protect all stakeholders’ interests and uphold societal expectations and values.” (World Economic Forum 2022; p.4). Despite recognition of its importance, however, digitalisation and the ever-increasing ‘datafication’ of human lives have fuelled a growing crisis of trust between citizens/consumers and the various institutions responsible for collecting and exploiting data resulting from interactions and transactions with digital systems.
While there is widespread acknowledgement of the need to reduce the digital trust gap, there remains a lack of evidence about the extent of mistrust in the population, how it varies across subgroups and about its implications for willingness to use different online services and share personal data online. To complicate matters, there is a lack of consensus around how digital trust should be measured and how to understand the mechanisms by which it affects decision-making and behaviour. This new project will address these various research needs, focusing on the specific context of how digital trust influences willingness to participate in social surveys involving digital data collection. Growing use of digital data collection tools for research purposes and the production of official statistics (e.g., through online surveys, mobile software applications (research apps) and wearable bluetooth devices) now requires participants to share different types of personal data over different platforms, via different modes of data capture, contributing to confusion and concerns about data security and privacy. As a result, response rates are typically low, presenting a range of threats to the quality of the data and validity of conclusions drawn from them.
In this context, this project seeks to: a) improve understanding of the nature of digital trust and how it should be measured in surveys; b) assess the prevalence of digital trust in the Swiss population and identify its main correlates and antecedents; c) investigate the extent to which, and the mechanisms by which different components of digital trust act as barriers to participation in digital data collection, and the implications of this for data quality; and d) test and compare the effectiveness of different trust-enhancement strategies for promoting willingness to take part in digital data collection.
To address these broad aims, we plan to analyse new data collected in the context of the 2024 MOSAiCH (Measurement and Observation of Social Attitudes in Switzerland) and International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) survey on 'Digital Societies' and data from survey experiments designed to test ways to build trust and motivate participation in app-based surveys. Conclusions from the project will make novel theoretical, substantive and practical contributions to survey methodology and practice, as well as contribute to broader reflections on ways to reduce barriers to the effective exploitation of digital research data.
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