Leveraging Data Donations for Communication Research: Exploring Drivers Behind the Willingness to Donate

ABSTRACT Using data donations to collect digital trace data holds great potential for communication research, which has not yet been fully realized. Besides limited awareness and expertise among researchers, a central challenge is to motivate people to donate their personal data. Therefore, this article investigates which factors affect people’s willingness to donate across different platforms and data types. The study applies a multilevel approach that explains the reported willingness to donate different types of data (level 1) belonging to different platforms (level 2) from potential data donors with individual characteristics (level 3) to a hypothetical research project. The analysis is based on data collected through a national online survey (n = 833). We find higher willingness to donate YouTube data compared to Facebook, Instagram, or Google, as well as relevant influencing factors at all three levels. Greater willingness is found for lower perceived sensitivity and higher perceived relevance of the data (level of data type), greater perceived behavioral control to request and submit the data (platform level), more favorable attitudes toward data donation and the donation purpose, as well as lower contextual privacy concerns (individual level). Based on these findings, practical implications for future data donation studies are proposed.