Identifying the Consent Behavior to Link Survey and Administrative Data

Abstract

This thesis aims to understand the determinants of consent behavior in linking survey and administrative data, from two perspectives; one with the metadata formed using the surveys with consent questions for data linkage, namely the macro approach and the other perspective is the analysis of the General Social Survey (GSS) which is a survey with consent for data linkage, namely the micro approach. There are two main objectives; the first one is to find the significant survey characteristics to influence the consent decision and similarly, the second one is the consent asking procedures to influence the consent behavior. Given this objective, in the first stage, a systematic review is conducted to analyze and present the results of survey research that uses consent for data linkage in their survey. At this stage, there is a wide variety of surveys from different countries that constitute the data of this part. The systematic review procedures are followed to collect these data. Through systematic review statistical procedures, the study evaluates numerous factors of survey and consent design characteristics with constructed variables such as survey response rate, topic, country, year, type, mode, age of target population, sponsor, and various aspects related to the consent request process. The continuous consent rate is modeled with multiple and stepwise approaches. The second section examines consent research at the micro-survey level, using the GSS as an example. The consent rate, a binary dependent variable, is explained by binary logistic regression. The results of both perspectives indicate that respondents' trust in organizations and trust, in general, are related to their consent decisions. The other identified variables seem to have less impact on consent rates in these surveys.