I4NG Hackathon 2025

"Make it Digital" Pillar: CROss-National Online Survey (CRONOS) and The European Social Survey (ESS) Data Analysis for Policy Brief

📌 Project Overview

The project was developed as part of the I4NG Hackathon 2025 and focuses on understanding what influences Europeans’ confidence in digital fact-checking and how to strengthen these skills through policy recommendations.

📊 Key Findings

• Only 30% of Europeans feel confident in their ability to verify online information.
• 67% of frequent internet users lack confidence in digital fact-checking.
• Confidence is associated with:
  • Ability to find product/service information online
  • Digital privacy skills: cookie restriction and social media profile access control
  • Trust in scientists (positive effect)
  • General trust in others (negative effect)

🧠 Policy Recommendations

1. Mirror Online Shopping Behaviors
   Design fact-checking training that mimics familiar digital consumer habits.

2. Integrate with Digital Privacy
   Combine fact-checking education with privacy tools and practices.

3. Clarify Trust Boundaries
   Emphasize the difference between real-world trust and online information trust.

4. Support Academic Communication
   Train scholars to share evidence-based knowledge in accessible ways.

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Read the full policy brief or see supplementary tables.

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📂 Data Sources

This project uses open data from the following sources:

• CRONOS3 Wave 1, edition 1.1
  European Social Survey European Research Infrastructure (ESS ERIC) (2025) CRONOS3 Wave 1. Sikt - Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. https://doi.org/10.21338/cronos3-w1.

• ESS11 - integrated file, edition 3.0
  European Social Survey European Research Infrastructure (ESS ERIC) (2025) ESS11 - integrated file, edition 3.0 [Data set]. Sikt - Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. https://doi.org/10.21338/ess11e03_0.

• ESS10 – Integrated File, edition 3.2
  European Social Survey European Research Infrastructure (ESS ERIC) (2023) ESS10 - integrated file, edition 3.2 [Data set]. Sikt - Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. https://doi.org/10.21338/ess10e03_2.

• ESS10 Self-Completion – Integrated File, edition 3.1
  European Social Survey European Research Infrastructure (ESS ERIC) (2023) ESS10 Self-completion - integrated file, edition 3.1 [Data set]. Sikt - Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. https://doi.org/10.21338/ess10sce03_1.

Countries included: Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom.
Sample size: n = 9,538 (internet users only).

🔁 Reproducibility

To reproduce the analysis:

1. Create a folder named data in your working directory.
2. Download the .sav files from the sources above.
3. Place them in the data folder.
4. Run the R scripts provided in this repository.

All supplementary tables and code are available in this repo.

👥 Authors

• Jakub Adamski – jakub.adamski@uni.lodz.pl

• Remigiusz Żulicki – remigiusz.zulicki@ni.lodz.pl

Faculty of Economics and Sociology, University of Lodz, Poland

📄 License

This work is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0