Data Donations in the Media: The public portrayal of a promising method
Data donations are new to communication science. They offer advantages over conventional methods, but studies show that the willingness to donate is a decisive hurdle for data quality. One problem could be that the public has relatively little knowledge about the risks and benefits of participating in data donations studies. E.g., only 10 percent of survey participants in a sample representative for the Swiss population have heard the term before (Pfiffner & Friemel, 2023).
Media reporting is generally an instance of public knowledge transfer. As such, media coverage could be a first touching point with the term data donations for recipients and could potentially influence awareness, offer orientation, and shape opinions.
Against this background, our study analyses (1) the extent to which media report on data donations, (2) which key actors (e.g., private sector or public universities) are mentioned to be stakeholders in the context of data donations, (3) whether data donations are displayed positively in general, and (4) whether and to which extent risks and benefits for potential participants and the public are mentioned. Our study—which is work in progress at the moment—aims to map the media coverage of eleven major German news outlets and German Google News results, from 2014 to 2024.
We find 330 articles and 48 Google results mentioning data donations, most of them touching upon the RKI’s COVID data donation. The comparatively low extent exacerbates the question of public’s awareness and the necessity to identify key actors in the field. Moreover, it is important to understand whether the little information that is publicly transmitted additionally emphasizes risks (e.g., data protection violations) or benefits. These and further results will be available in early spring and discussed at the symposium.
Elisabeth Schmidbauer, Jörg Haßler