Linked digital trace and survey data for secondary research: Potential and constraints

This free event is co-organised by the UK Data Service in collaboration with the DIGISURVOR project. It is the second in a series of webinars dedicated to data linkage and integration.

Social and political research has traditionally relied on self-reported survey data to understand public opinion and behaviour. Today, digital trace represents an increasingly valuable source of information for researchers. These are records of human behaviour online, from the products they purchase, to the websites they visit, to the content they post on social media. When we link these data with participant survey data, we can unlock new insights and avenues of research for social scientists.

The DIGISURVOR project, supported by the  Smart Data Research UK accelerator scheme, explores the technical, scientific and ethical challenges to making these linked datasets available for open research. This webinar will outline the primary goals of the DIGISURVOR project, the work that has been achieved to date, and the value and challenges to data linkage that have been revealed.

It will cover:

• Background to the project and the growing popularity of survey-to-digital trace data linkage in the social sciences.
• Balancing data protection and open research requirements, key considerations when releasing linked datasets through Statistical Disclosure Control (SDC).
• The biases that can emerge when we link survey data with digital trace data, specifically in the case of participant social media.
• How we successfully link data sources together and how we can derive new sources of insight from two types of linked smart data: Social media (X), URL tracking (web browsing).
• The methodological skills required for processing these types of linked data.

By the end of the webinar, participants should have gained a greater understanding of the increasing use of survey-to-digital trace data linkage and the methodological and ethical challenges it can uncover. They should have developed an improved awareness of where data linkage sits in the context of open sharing and how linkage can introduce new biases into a dataset. Finally, they should have improved knowledge about methods for successful linkage of data and computational techniques for generating new variables of interest from linked datasets.

Presenters:

Pierre Walthéry, UK Data Service. Pierre is part of the Training and User Support team at the UK Data Service and is the organiser of this webinar series. He holds a PhD in Social Statistics, and his work focuses on skills at the intersection of traditional and emerging data analysis techniques.

Conor Gaughan is a postdoctoral research associate in the Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research at the University of Manchester. He specialises in advanced quantitative methods for social and political research and his interests are in digital politics and communication.

This event will be livestreamed on our UK Data Service YouTube channel but the chat will be disabled. By registering and attending the Zoom event you will be able to ask questions and interact.

Recordings of UK Data Service events are made available on our YouTube channel and, together with the slides, on our past events pages soon after the event has taken place.