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

TL;DR

This paper identifies three measurement challenges—entangling, flattening, and bundling—in using digital trace data for media consumption analysis, highlighting potential errors and ambiguities introduced by granular data collection methods.

Contribution

It introduces a new measurement framework, Screenomics, and systematically uncovers three key challenges affecting the accuracy of digital trace-based media measurement.

Findings

Identifies entangling as a measurement error from proxying content exposure.

Highlights flattening as a loss of temporal detail in aggregated data.

Discusses bundling as an oversimplification of media interaction durations.

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.