Donations to society: indicators of prosocial behavior in the context of healthcare

Convincing society of the value of donations, such as data donation, blood donation, or organ donation remains an extensive challenge requiring good understanding of a multitude of dimensions that may be relevant for people’s participation or non-participation in public goods. For example, demographic characteristics, as well as psychological and ethical intrapersonal considerations are relevant to participants in determining participation, engagement, or drop-out in biobank research (Broekstra, Aris-Meijer, Maeckelberge, Otten, & Stolk, 2019; Gaskell et al., 2013).

Preliminary research of this project group showed that values, trust, and donor status of citizens are robustly associated with (non) participation in Lifelines, and other prosocial behavior (manuscripts under review). Other studies have shown that context of donation may trigger different concerns or dimensions of trust, e.g. concerns about collaboration with scientific or commercial organizations and the context of biobank or blood bank (Raivola, Snell, Helén, & Partanen, 2019). The question remains how the contributions of data to scientific research relate to other contributions to society. Moreover, it is not yet clear if the underlying factors of these different forms of donation vary. It is thus worthwhile to broadly investigate the factors of societal contribution by comparing different forms of donations.