Authors
Summary
Linkages between surveys and administrative data provide an important opportunity for social and health research, but such linkages often require the informed consent of respondents. We use experimental data collection across five different samples to study how consent decisions are made. More reflective decision processes are associated with higher rates of consent, greater comprehension of the proposed data linkage, and greater confidence in the decision, but only about a third of respondents report using a reflective decision process. This suggests that the provision of additional information is unlikely to lead to significant improvements in informed consent.
Subjects
Notes
Code: The replication code for this article, as well as links to the data, are available through OSF at https://osf.io/x6jgv/ (Burton et al. 2025).
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© The Author(s) 2025.
Open Access
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).