Anna Lethborg
Anna is a Director at the Social Research Centre with over 20 years' experience as a social research consultant. In 2015-16, Anna managed the initial recruitment for Australia’s first and only probability-based panel, Life in Australia™. She managed the panel during its establishment and now leads the Life in Australia™ research and panel management team.
Session
Increasing opportunities to link attitudinal and behavioural survey data to administrative records presents new opportunities for social research. Australia’s only probability-based online panel, Life in Australia™, has recently linked continuing panellists to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Person Level Integrated Data Asset (PLIDA), offering new possibilities for combining high-quality survey estimates with PLIDA’s expanding collection of data from Commonwealth and other sources. This paper examines the drivers of linkage consent using the available profile data on Life in Australia™ panellists to provide insights into the utility of such linkage.
Drawing on survey and panel profile information, we investigate the demographic, socioeconomic, attitudinal, and participation characteristics associated with consent to linkage on Life in Australia™. We use random forest models to understand characteristics predicting consent at different stages of the linkage from general consent to PLIDA to specific survey data linkage consent. We further assess representativeness at different stages of the recruitment funnel with comparison to high-quality external benchmarks via absolute average error.
Beyond providing empirical evidence on linkage consent behaviour, this study contributes to a growing methodological literature on survey-administrative data linkage consent. The findings will be of interest to researchers who are considering data linkage. They will also help identify factors that may influence the generalisability of analyses conducted using linked survey and administrative data.