Data donation as a method for investigating trends and challenges in digital media landscapes at national scale

This publication demonstrates how data donation can be scaled to national population level to understand trends in digital media usage and potential challenges for digital democracies. We describe and discuss the results of our novel methodological setup combining data donation and surveys about the Danish population’s use of YouTube as an illustrative case.
Through three consecutive survey steps, the study collected trace data from participants using quotas for gender, age, and education to approximate a sample representative of the adult Danish population of YouTube users, resulting in a final donated data sample of n = 1,063. This sample size is much larger than other similar data donation studies conducted. In a fourth step, these data were linked with a comprehensive post-survey including questions about YouTube use, social media use, news use, mental health, personality traits, conspiracy mentality, political views, political interest, political efficacy, and more.
The publication documents the data collection procedure and analyses response rates, screening out and drop-off at different steps of the data collection, and how well the final sample matches the adult Danish population of YouTube users (as estimated in a prior representative survey study). Furthermore, we provide a descriptive statistical overview of the donated data and discuss ethical considerations and clearance of the study. The methodological design was developed by the research team. The Danish survey institute Epinion was responsible for conducting the data collection and technical implementation.