What do people do online?
Using data donation to understand digital behavior.

a workshop at the SPP Junior Researcher Meeting

Frieder Rodewald

University of Mannheim & Institute for Employment Research

Sebastian Prechsl

Institute for Employment Research & LMU Munich

October 22, 2025

Our Agenda

frodew.github.io/workshop_spp_annual_meeting/

1️⃣ What is digital trace data?

2️⃣ What is data donation? - The participant’s perspective.

3️⃣ What is data donation? - The researcher’s perspective.

Who are you?

Please raise your hand 🤚 if you …

  • are familiar with the term digital trace data
  • have worked with APIs
  • have worked with data donation
  • have worked with automated content analysis
  • regularly use programming languages (e.g., R, Python)

About me: Frieder Rodewald

🎓 PhD, University of Mannheim & Institute for Employment Research

🧐 Research interests: "I study what people do online."


More info: github.com/frodew & frieder-rodewald.de

About me: Sebastian Prechsl

🎓 Postdoc at Institute for Employment Research & LMU

🧐 Research interests: Social inequalities (in the labor market), potentials of digital trace data for labor market research

👉 part of the SPP project Integrating Data Donations in Survey Infrastructure

Our Team

A huge thanks to Valerie Hase, for contributing to the conceptualizion of a previous data donation workshop at CompText in Vienna.

What is the goal of this workshop?

  • ✅ Understanding digital data traces as a type of data
  • ✅ Understanding data donation as a method of data access
  • ✅ Working through key steps of data donation methods (participant & researcher view)
  • ❓ Discussing when (not) to use data donation studies
  • ❌ Detailed implementation (e.g., server set-up, coding data extraction scripts)

1️⃣ What is digital trace data?

🤔 Which examples for digital trace data you know?

What is digital trace data?

💡 Definition: The recording and storing of activities on digital platforms to draw conclusions about digital and analog phenomena.

This might include:

  • Tweets, likes, shares on social media
  • Geo data (locations, movements)
  • Digital payments
  • Spotify playlists

Where can we find/collect digital trace data?

  • Apps (e.g., running apps)
  • Social media platforms (e.g., Instagram)
  • Payment systems (e.g., Paypal)
  • Wearable devices (e.g., smart watch)

Which (latent) constructs can we measure?

⚠️ Be careful: These "advantages" are often claimed, but not empirically proven.

👉 Digital traces are neither necessarily less biased, cheaper, or larger.

(Dis-)advantages of digital trace data

  • ✅ More fine-grained, often longitudinal measures due to timestamps
  • ✅ Partly measurement of new variables (e.g., algorithmic inference)
  • ❌ Bias due to errors in representation and measurement
  • ❌ Implementation can be expensive and cumbersome
  • ❌ More data does not mean better data!

How can we collect digital traces?

Platform- and user-centric methods

🤔 Questions?

References

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