ESRA 2027 sessions by theme

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Session Details

Linking Panel Wave Respondents While Protecting Anonymity: Methodological Experiences and Evidence

Panel surveys require respondents to be identified consistently across waves in order to analyse individual changes. At the same time, ensuring anonymity is an essential requirement of survey research. This creates a fundamental methodological challenge: How can respondents be reliably linked across multiple waves without compromising their privacy?
A range of approaches has been developed to address this challenge, including researcher-generated identifiers, self-generated codes, combinations of personal characteristics, and other forms of pseudonymisation. These approaches differ not only in their level of privacy protection, but also in their reliability, respondent burden, and potential for linkage errors.
This session invites empirical and methodological contributions that examine different approaches to linking respondents across panel waves. We particularly welcome studies that report practical experiences with implementing a specific identification strategy in repeated surveys and provide empirical evidence on its performance. Relevant evidence may include rates of successful wave-to-wave linkage, duplicate or erroneous matches, missing or unusable identifiers, respondent burden, item nonresponse, or differences between alternative approaches. The findings from this approach should be openly discussed.
The session aims to move beyond purely technical discussions of respondent identification by considering the consequences of identification strategies for the quality and usability of longitudinal survey data. Contributions may also address the trade-offs between anonymity, linkage accuracy, respondent acceptance, and survey design.
By bringing together empirical experiences from different panel contexts, the session seeks to identify practical strengths and limitations of existing approaches and to develop evidence-based recommendations for selecting and implementing respondent identification strategies in panel surveys.