How do survey respondents decide whether to consent to data linkage?

Publication type

Journal Article

Series Number

Authors

Publication date

July 9, 2025

Summary:

Linkages between surveys and administrative data provide an important opportunity for social and health research, but such linkages often require the informed consent of respondents. We use experimental data collection across five different samples to study how consent decisions are made. More reflective decision processes are associated with higher rates of consent, greater comprehension of the proposed data linkage, and greater confidence in the decision, but only about a third of respondents report using a reflective decision process. This suggests that the provision of additional information is unlikely to lead to significant improvements in informed consent.

Published in

Sociological Methods & Research

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1177/00491241251344289

ISSN

00491241

Subjects

Notes

Online Early

© The Author(s) 2025.

Open Access

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

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