Participation in Data Donation: Co-Creative, Collaborative, and Contributory Engagements with Athletes and Their Intimate Data

Data donation is an emerging practice enabling personal data collection for research. While it offers opportunities to access new insights into people’s behavior and experiences through their digital-trace data, the role of individuals – as research participants – is limited in most data donation projects. They primarily contribute with data, limiting the perspectives included and accounted for around critical research-design decisions. In this paper, we explore the opportunity to embed data donation in research processes that are not only contributory but collaborative and co-created. To do so, we present a participatory data donation case study focused on athletes’ perceptions of the impact of their menstrual cycle on their sports performance through their physical activity data. Based on the data donation experiences of 20 athletes, our paper provides insights into people’s preferences and expectations in participatory data donation processes and discusses considerations for supporting various degrees of participation in future data donation research.