The effects of placement and order on consent to data linkage in a web survey

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

February 24, 2024

Summary:

We report on an experiment in a supplemental web survey as part of a longitudinal study in the United Kingdom where we ask survey respondents to consent to two forms of data linkage to health records and to consent to be mailed a serology kit. We varied the placement (early, early in context, or late in the survey) and order (linkage first or serology first) of the consent requests. We also examine reasons for consent or non-consent. We find that order of the requests does not make much difference, but making the requests early in the survey significantly increases consent rates over asking them after a series of content-related questions (by 3.4 percentage points) or later in the survey (by 7.2 percentage points). This is consistent with previous research showing that early requests for consent in a survey have a positive effect. The main reason chosen for not consenting related to the personal nature of the information requested.

Published in

Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1093/jssam/smae004

ISSN

23250984

Subjects

Notes

Online Early

© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com


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