Best practices for studies using digital data donation

Digital trace data form a rich, growing source of data for social sciences and humanities. Data donation offers an innovative and ethical approach to collect these digital trace data. In data donation studies, participants request a copy of the digital trace data a data controller (e.g., large digital social media or video platforms) collected about them. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation obliges platforms to provide such a copy. Next, the participant can choose to share (part of) this data copy with the researcher. This way, the researcher can obtain the digital trace data of interest with active consent of the participant. Setting up a data donation study involves several steps and considerations. If executed poorly, these steps might threaten a study’s quality. In this paper, we introduce a workflow for setting up a robust data donation study. This workflow is based on error sources identified in the Total Error Framework for data donation by Boeschoten et al. (2022a) as well as on experiences in earlier data donation studies by the authors. The workflow is discussed in detail and linked to challenges and considerations for each step. We aim to provide a starting point with guidelines for researchers seeking to set up and conduct a data donation study.