Digital Trust: Understanding and addressing its impact on digital data collection in surveys

Recent years have seen a growing interest in the concept of 'digital trust' (DT) as a fundamental component of the health of digital societies and their capacity to effectively exploit data for the common good. DT has been defined as "individuals' expectation that digital technologies and services - and the organizations providing them - will protect all stakeholders' interests and uphold societal expectations and values." (World Economic Forum 2022; p.4). Digitalisation and the ever-increasing 'datafication' of human lives - both accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic - have brought to the fore a growing crisis of trust between citizens/consumers and the various institutional bodies and businesses responsible for collecting and exploiting data resulting from interactions and transactions with digital systems. Despite widespread acknowledgement of the need to reduce the DT gap, however, there remains a lack of evidence about the extent of mistrust in the population, how it varies across subgroups and about its implications for willingness to use different online services and share personal data online. To complicate matters, there is a lack of consensus around how DT should be measured and how to understand the mechanisms by which its various components interact to affect decision-making and behaviour. The present project will address these various research needs, focusing specifically on how a lack of digital trust contributes to resistance to participate in social surveys involving digital data collection (DDC). Growing use of DDC tools (e.g., online surveys, mobile software applications (research apps) and wearable bluetooth devices) for research purposes and the production of official statistics now requires participants to share different types of sensitive personal data over different online platforms, via different modes of data capture, contributing to confusion and concerns about data security and privacy. As a result, response rates to DDC are typically low, presenting a range of threats to the quality of the data and validity of conclusions drawn from them. In this context, this project seeks to: a) improve understanding of the nature of DT and how it should be measured in surveys; b) assess the prevalence of DT in the Swiss population and identify its main correlates and antecedents; c) investigate the extent to which, and the mechanisms by which different components of DT act as barriers to participation in DDC, and the implications of this for data quality; and d) test and compare the effectiveness of different trust-enhancement strategies for promoting willingness to take part in DDC. To address these broad aims, we plan to analyse new data collected in the context of the 2024 MOSAiCH (Measurement and Observation of Social Attitudes in Switzerland) and International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) survey on 'Digital Societies' (conducted by the Project Partner at FORS, the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences). The Swiss survey included supplementary questions (contributed by the PI) on DT and willingness to take part in DDC, and an experiment to test a trust-enhancement strategy to boost response in its second wave. The present project will extend these data with an additional follow-up wave involving DDC (an app-based survey) and two further experiments to test ways to build trust and assess their impact on actual DDC participation. This unique and highly innovative research design provides an unprecedented opportunity to move research on DT and digital survey methodology beyond the current state of the art. Combined with a theoretically-informed measurement framework and conceptual model of how components of DT interact in the context of DDC in surveys, conclusions from the project will make novel theoretical, substantive and practical contributions to reducing barriers to the effective exploitation of digital research data.