(2024):
Measurement of physical activity in older adults through data donation.
[Data Donation Symposium 2024, Amsterdam, 30/05/2024 - 31/05/2024].
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Integrating Data Donation in Survey Infrastructure: Quantifying, Explaining, and Addressing Errors in Representation and Measurement
Project Directors
Prof. Dr. Florian Keusch
Project Staff
Frieder Rodewald
MZES, DFG-funded
2022 – 2027
Research question/goal:
The widespread use of smartphones creates an enormous amount of digital trace data from log files about smartphone activities (e.g. calls and text messages, app usage) and from smartphone built-in sensors about their everyday behaviours (e.g. mobility, physical activity). Detailed behavioural measures open the possibility for a modernised assessment of social integration, social networks, and stress at the workplace. A sample of 4,293 participants of a nationally representative large-scale panel survey were asked to install a research app (IAB-SMART) on their smartphones, which passively collected novel data for social science research. Beginning in January 2018, 687 (15.9 percent) participants installed the app and contributed data on geolocation, physical activity, app usage, call and SMS logs, and phonebook contacts over the course of half a year. This project builds on and expands preliminary methodological work to improve population inference from the data and to provide access to such data for other research groups. The three objectives of this project are to (1) develop weights that adjust for coverage and nonparticipation error in order to produce unbiased population estimates on the measured constructs such as social integration, social networks, and work-related stress, (2) evaluate sources of measurement error for the different types of sensors and log file data and compare the passively measured data to self-reports, and (3) evaluate ways to anonymise the passively collected smartphone data of the project and make them available to the research community.
Current stage:
In June 2025, we conducted a study with over 2,000 participants from an online non-probability panel, in which we implemented several survey experiments and collected donated data from LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube to test methods specifically designed to increase participation rates without introducing additional bias (WP1). The results are currently being evaluated. We plan to reproduce our findings in a large probability-based panel study in collaboration with the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) (WP2). Building on these findings, subsequent analyses will examine issues of representation (WP3) and measurement error (WP4).
Publications
Presentations
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(2023): Collect Information about Facebook Usage via Data Donation: Willingness, Participation, and Bias. [Data Donation Symposium, Zurich, 11/09/2023 - 12/09/2023]. More
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(2023): What Can We Ask for and How Should We Ask? An Experimental Vignette Study on Request and Respondent Characteristics Affecting the Acceptability of and Willingness to Agree to Digital Trace Data Donation. [Data Donation Symposium, Zurich, 11/09/2023 - 12/09/2023]. More
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(2023): Do You Have Two Minutes to Talk about Your Data? Using Data Donation to Collect Facebook Data. [AAPOR 78th Annual Conference, Philadelphia, PA, 10/05/2023 - 12/05/2023]. More
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(2023): Sharing Digital Traces: Experimental Evidence on the Influence of the Data Type, the Recipient, and a Safe Transmission. [10th Conference of the European Survey Research Association, Milan, 17/07/2023 - 21/07/2023]. More