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Survey researchers are increasingly seeking opportunities to link interview data with administrative records. However, obtaining consent from all survey respondents (or certain subgroups) remains a barrier to performing record linkage in many studies. We experimentally investigated whether emphasizing different benefits of record linkage to respondents in a telephone survey of employee working conditions improves respondents’ willingness to consent to linkage of employment administrative records relative to a neutral consent request. We found that emphasizing linkage benefits related to “time savings” yielded a small, albeit statistically significant, improvement in the overall linkage consent rate (86.0) relative to the neutral consent request (83.8 percent). The time savings argument was particularly effective among “busy” respondents. A second benefit argument related to “improved study value” did not yield a statistically significant improvement in the linkage consent rate (84.4 percent) relative to the neutral request. This benefit argument was also ineffective among the subgroup of respondents considered to be most likely to have a self-interest in the study outcomes. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the practical implications of these findings and offers suggestions for possible research extensions.

Faculty at the University of Maryland have been working with Facebook to design a worldwide survey aimed at collecting coronavirus data during the global pandemic.

This article compares the factors affecting completion times (CTs) to web survey questions when they are answered using two different devices: personal computers (PCs) and smartphones. Several studies have reported longer CTs when respondents use smartphones than PCs. This is a concern to survey researchers because longer CTs may increase respondent burden and the risk of breakoff. However, few studies have analyzed the specific reasons for the time difference. In this analysis, we analyzed timing data from 836 respondents who completed the same web survey twice, once using a smartphone and once using PC, as part of a randomized crossover experiment in the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences panel. The survey contained a mix of questions (single choice, numeric entry, and text entry) that were displayed on separate pages. We included both page-level and respondent-level factors that may have contributed to the time difference between devices in cross-classified multilevel models. We found that respondents took about 1.4 times longer when using smartphones than PCs. This difference was larger when a page had more than one question or required text entry. The difference was also larger among respondents who had relatively low levels of familiarity and experience using smartphones. Respondent multitasking was associated with slower CTs, regardless of the device used. Practical implications and avenues for future research are discussed.

The rising penetration of smartphones now gives researchers the chance to collect data from smartphone users through passive mobile data collection via apps. Examples of passively collected data include geolocation, physical movements, online behavior and browser history, and app usage. However, to passively collect data from smartphones, participants need to agree to download a research app to their smartphone. This leads to concerns about nonconsent and nonparticipation. In the current study, we assess the circumstances under which smartphone users are willing to participate in passive mobile data collection. We surveyed 1,947 members of a German nonprobability online panel who own a smartphone using vignettes that described hypothetical studies where data are automatically collected by a research app on a participant’s smartphone. The vignettes varied the levels of several dimensions of the hypothetical study, and respondents were asked to rate their willingness to participate in such a study. Willingness to participate in passive mobile data collection is strongly influenced by the incentive promised for study participation but also by other study characteristics (sponsor, duration of data collection period, option to switch off the app) as well as respondent characteristics (privacy and security concerns, smartphone experience).