Willingness of Online Panelists to Perform Additional Tasks

Abstract

People’s willingness to share data with researchers is the fundamental raw material for most social science research. So far, survey researchers have mainly asked respondents to share data in the form of answers to survey questions but there is a growing interest in using alternative sources of data. Less is known about people’s willingness to share these other kinds of data. In this study, we aim to: 1) provide information about the willingness of people to share different types of data; 2) explore the reasons for their acceptance or refusal, and 3) try to determine which variables affect the willingness to perform these additional tasks. We use data from a survey implemented in 2016 in Spain, in which around 1,400 panelists of the Netquest online access panel were asked about their hypothetical willingness to share different types of data: passive measurement on devices they already use; wearing special devices to passively monitor activity; providing them with measurement devices and then having them self-report the results; providing physical specimens or bodily fluids (e.g. saliva); others. Open questions were used to follow up on the reasons for acceptance or refusal in the case of the use of a tracker. Our results suggest that the acceptance level is quite low in general, but there are large differences across tasks and respondents. The main reasons justifying both acceptance and refusal are related to privacy, security and trust. Our regression models also suggest that we can identify factors associated with such willingness.