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Identification, Impacts, and Opportunities of Three Common Measurement Considerations when using Digital Trace Data

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  • Daniel Muise
  • Nilam Ram
  • Thomas Robinson
  • Byron Reeves

Abstract

Cataloguing specific URLs, posts, and applications with digital traces is the new best practice for measuring media use and content consumption. Despite the apparent accuracy that comes with greater granularity, however, digital traces may introduce additional ambiguity and new errors into the measurement of media use. In this note, we identify three new measurement challenges when using Digital Trace Data that were recently uncovered using a new measurement framework - Screenomics - that records media use at the granularity of individual screenshots obtained every few seconds as people interact with mobile devices. We label the considerations as follows: (1) entangling - the common measurement error introduced by proxying exposure to content by exposure to format; (2) flattening - aggregating unique segments of media interaction without incorporating temporal information, most commonly intraindividually and (3) bundling - summation of the durations of segments of media interaction, indiscriminate with respect to variations across media segments.

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  • Daniel Muise & Nilam Ram & Thomas Robinson & Byron Reeves, 2023. "Identification, Impacts, and Opportunities of Three Common Measurement Considerations when using Digital Trace Data," Papers 2310.00197, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2310.00197
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    1. Nina Cesare & Hedwig Lee & Tyler McCormick & Emma Spiro & Emilio Zagheni, 2018. "Promises and Pitfalls of Using Digital Traces for Demographic Research," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 55(5), pages 1979-1999, October.
    2. Byron Reeves & Thomas Robinson & Nilam Ram, 2020. "Time for the Human Screenome Project," Nature, Nature, vol. 577(7790), pages 314-317, January.
    3. Gregory Eady & Jonathan Nagler & Andy Guess & Jan Zilinsky & Joshua A. Tucker, 2019. "How Many People Live in Political Bubbles on Social Media? Evidence From Linked Survey and Twitter Data," SAGE Open, , vol. 9(1), pages 21582440198, February.
    4. Andrew M. Guess & Brendan Nyhan & Jason Reifler, 2020. "Exposure to untrustworthy websites in the 2016 US election," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 4(5), pages 472-480, May.
    5. Bartels, Larry M., 1993. "Messages Received: The Political Impact of Media Exposure," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 87(2), pages 267-285, June.
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