Social media data donation through data download packages (DDPs) is a promising new
way of collecting individual-level digital trace data with informed consent. Nevertheless,
given the novelty of this approach, little is known about whether and how people would
share their data with researchers, although this could seriously affect selection
bias and thus, the outer validity of the results. To study the determinants of data-sharing
and help future data donation studies with detecting the conditions, under which the
willingness is the highest, we pre-registered two vignette experiments and embedded
them in two online surveys conducted in Hungary and the US. In hypothetical requests
for donating social media data via DDPs, we manipulated the amount of the monetary
incentives (1), the presence or lack of non-monetary incentives (2), the number of
requested platforms (3), the estimated upload/download time (4), and the type of requested
data (5). The results revealed that data-sharing attitude is strongly subject to the
parameters of the actual study, how the request is framed, and some respondent characteristics.
Monetary incentives increased willingness to participate in both countries, while
other effects were not consistent between the two countries.
