Selects civique for participants

The information that we collect in the Selects-Civique Study depends on whether you participate on your web browser, or via the Civique app.

If you complete the questionnaires via your web browser, we will collect the following information:

• Answers to the questions (multiple choice and free texts) of our questionnaires (including question about your political opinions)
• Records of how much time you spent completing the questionnaires each time you log-in, and which pages of the study you visited
• Information on the devices and applications you used to access the study (like your browser type and operating system).

If you complete the questionnaires via the Civique app, we will collect the following personal information:

Questionnaire data:

• Answers to the questions (multiple choice and free texts) of our questionnaires (including questions about your political opinion).

Plus, we may ask you to provide:

• Photos (with GPS location).

You are completely free to decide whether you will provide this data to us for the purposes of our research. All of the information that you provide will be treated as confidential and will only be used for scientific research purposes.

Passive data:

In addition to your personal data, the Civique app captures other non-personal data from your smartphone referred to as “passive data” each time you participate in a challenge, including:

• Your GPS location,
• The configuration of your phone (manufacturer, model, system version),
• The version of Civique you use,
• The connectivity status of your device (i.e. whether on Wifi, a mobile phone network, or Bluetooth),
• Civique application usage logs, which record e.g. the time of day and date when you use Civique on your smartphone.
• Whether you have certain news media applications installed on your phone (a full list is available here).

This information is of interest to our research, as it can help us to improve the design of future surveys using the Civique app (for example, by making questionnaires shorter, and more convenient to answer) and respond to any technical problems that may arise. Information about news media applications installed on smartphones is of interest to us because it tells us something about how people stay informed about news and current affairs. By signing the consent form, you agree to us collecting these data and using them for this purpose.

Please note that the personal information within your Civique account settings is not shared with the researchers of the Selects-Civique study and is not part of the challenge data.

Auxiliary data:

Together with the sample contact information provided to us by the Federal Statistical Office, we also received some information about the socio-demographic characteristics of sample members, which comes from the population registers, which are used to build their sampling frame. This information has been separated from the names and addresses and other contact information we received, and each individual has been assigned a completely unique identification code for the purposes of survey management and data processing. All personal identifying (contact) information in the sample file will be deleted once all final correspondence with sample members is finalized (latest at the end of June 2020). The Federal Statistical Office also supplies its own pseudonym for sample members, which can be used for linking the questionnaire and passive data from the Selects Civique study to other administrative data sources.

Each of the Selects-Civique data collection initiatives offers the chance to complete questionnaires about the issues that matter most to you and what is being done about them. If you decide to participate using the Civique app, these questionnaires will be divided into short modules called ‘challenges’, which will offer you the chance to provide different types of information about you, your opinions and about the area in which you live.

Your responses to the questionnaires and challenges will be compiled with those provided by all the other participants in the study and analysed statistically to draw inferences about what other people like you in your area think and feel about local civic causes, about the election campaign and about what influences your opinion.

The questionnaire data will be automatically transferred from your PC/phone to our data servers in Switzerland (in the case of Civique) and Ireland (in the case of the browser-based questionnaire). The data will then be transferred from these servers to a secure server at the University of Lausanne for the purposes of processing and analysis.  All personal identifying information will be detached from the questionnaire data as soon as the data collection period closes and stored separately. In the future, this anonymized data will be archived at FORSBase, which is a scientific data archive enabling the sharing of data with other social scientitists.  FORSBase fulfils the security standards of the data protection law.

Some of the other data sources (passive and auxiliary data, and any photographs provided) cannot be fully anonymised and so these data will never be shared beyond the Selects-Civique project team, and staff involved in future research projects using the data this study will produce.  As with the questionnaire data, at the end of the data collection period, these data will be immediately transferred to and stored on a secure server of the University of Lausanne until it is considered no longer useful for the purposes of our current research and any future funded projects designed to exploit the data. These data will be pseudonymised and will only be accessible for researchers of the LOIS team and its collaborators. In addition, all collaborators granted access to these pseudonymised data will need to sign a data usage agreement, which regulates the scientific usage of the data.

The Selects-Civique study is being carried out by a team including Prof. Dr. Caroline Roberts (University of Lausanne), Dr. Jessica Herzing (University of Lausanne/FORS), Prof. Dr. Anke Tresch (University of Lausanne/FORS) and Prof. Dr. Daniel Gatica-Perez (Idiap-EPFL), and research assistants and engineers employed by the project, which is co-funded by the EPFL-UNIL Collaborative Research on Science and Society (CROSS) programme through the LOIS project, and FORS, through infrastructure funding provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation. For any questions, please contact: selectscivique@fors.unil.ch

If you participate in Selects-Civique via a web browser, the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (FORS) will be responsible for collecting the data and storing it on the secure servers they use for their surveys. If you participate in Selects-Civique via the Civique app, then the Idiap Research Institute is responsible for collecting the data and storing it on their own secure servers. This is because the technology used for collecting the data using each method is slightly different. The data collected by Idiap Research Institute will later be compiled with those collected by FORS, to allow the researchers to analyse the data from all participants together, to get a complete picture of all the people who were invited to take part in the study.

Data collection and storage by both FORS and Idiap conform to the strictest requirements of the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (Loi fédérale sur la protection des données” – RS 235.1), which applies to every research project conducted in Switzerland. This law requires us to obtain your legal consent to collect your data and to protect your identity in the data we gather from you and store. This means that the stored data will not include any information that could be used to identify you personally. Data protection laws also govern how your data are stored. The data will be stored on secure servers at all times, and access to any identifying information (such as the login details we provide you with and your address data provided by the Federal Statistical Office) will be restricted to the members of the project team. Such information will be handled confidentially at all times. Your answers to the questions (multiple choice and free texts) of our questionnaires may later be archived and made accessible to other researchers interested in using Selects data, via the FORSBase” platform of the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences, FORS. In this case, all third parties who wish to use the data are also bound by data protection obligations. These obligations are laid down in a data usage agreement, which must be signed by the data recipient before FORS supplies the corresponding data. By signing the contract, the data recipients commit themselves:

• to using the data exclusively for the scientific research and teaching purposes specified in this agreement;
• to using the data only in compliance with the applicable data protection regulations; respect the confidentiality of personal data;
• to informing FORS of all publications based on the data obtained under this agreement;
• to not communicating or making available the data received by FORS to third parties, except to persons who have also signed this contract;
• to keeping the data secure from access by third parties;
• to definitively deleting the data after the completion of the research envisaged and to confirming this to FORS before the publication of the results.

The data generated by this study will be used by the project team for three main purposes:

1. To study the opinion and electoral behaviour of Swiss citizens living in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, as part of the Swiss Election Study (Selects). More information on this study can be found at selects.ch/info (first results will be published in April 2020).
2. To determine how the Civique App can be used to collect multimodal data to study public opinion and electoral behaviour in the context of a general population survey, instead of or in addition to traditional questionnaire surveys. To this end, the researchers are interested in how the data mentioned above can be used to complement traditional measures of opinion and behaviour, how to better motivate a representative sample of the population to participate in surveys, and how to facilitate and make participation in social research more interesting and fun. The data may be analysed for this purpose in conjunction with other personal data provided to project team by the Federal Statistical Office, from their sampling frame or other administrative registers, in order to understand the personal characteristics of the study participants and non-participants; or with publicly available data for the purposes of understanding how accurate those data are. The data will be stored, processed and analysed in strict accordance with Swiss data protection laws (see ‘How will you protect my data?’). This knowledge is important, as it will allow us to make recommendations about whether it is worthwhile to conduct social science surveys on mobile devices.
3. To understand and document participants’ use of the Civique app, including their responses to invitations to take part in challenges and their responses to the challenges themselves. For this purpose, any photographs provided by participants will be examined by members of the project team, in order to label their content or analyze them; and location data relating to where the Civique app is used might be plotted in maps. This analysis is important for investigating alternative ways of gathering social science data and for optimizing the implementation of general population surveys on mobile. In general, this research is important for ensuring high data quality in future scientific surveys.

Excerpts of anonymised data might be used for academic publications and presentations about Civique or the Selects-Civique Study. The data will never be used to identify specific individual participants and access to identifying information will be restricted to members of the project team.

By joining this study, you agree that Selects-Civique’s solicitors and administrators of the Civique platform may store data indefinitely for the uses mentioned above, as long as they considered useful for current and future research purposes.

Anonymized questionnaire data will be stored permanently at the FORSBase for the uses mentioned above. Pseudonymised data, which cannot be completely anonymised (i.e. the passively collected data, such as GPS data) will be stored for the duration of this project and other future projects designed to make use of these data, and in any case, until the publication of findings based on the data.

All participants have the right to access information about the processing of their personal data. You can delete or access the responses you provide to our questionnaires at any time during the duration of the project (until June 2020). Should you wish to do so, please write to selectscivique@fors.unil.ch or data@civique.org. Please note that in the future, once all identifying information has been removed from the data and the have been archived at the data archive FORSBase, it will be no longer possible to delete your data.

To download a copy of or data protection and privacy policy please click here.

We will only collect information from your Twitter account that is publicly available. This will include information from your account (such as your profile description, who you follow, and who follows you), the content of your tweets (including text, images, videos and web links), and background information about your tweets (such as when you tweeted, what type of device you tweeted from, and the location the tweet was sent from). We will collect information from your past tweets (up to the last 3,000) and will update this with information from more recent tweets on a regular basis. This information will be collected and stored for as long as they are useful for research purposes, or until you contact us to withdraw your permission. You can do this at any time, and do not have to give a reason.

What will you use this information for?

The information will be used for social research purposes only. Adding your Twitter information and your survey answers will allow researchers from universities to better understand your experiences and opinions. For example, by using extra information from your Twitter account, researchers can start to:

• Understand who uses Twitter and how they use it,
• See what Twitter information can tell us about people, and how accurate it is,
• Know what people in Switzerland are saying about things we don’t ask in the Selects-Civique study,
• Look at additional information related to questions asked in the survey.