What is Digital Identity? A Transdisciplinary Meta-synthesis

Our hyperconnected society depends on digital technologies for communication and essential services, including healthcare, finance and governance. Identity verification is crucial to ensuring secure and reliable access, inevitably involving data collection. Unprecedented levels of personal information are also being collected for profit, raising significant privacy concerns. Consequently, digital identity has emerged as a global priority. However, ‘digital identity’ is a highly complex and fragmented topic, viewed via distinct disciplinary lenses. This limits conceptual clarity and undermines multidisciplinary collaboration. Adopting an interpretivist epistemological stance, this meta-synthesis aims to understand the diverse and multifaceted ways in which digital identity is defined and conceptualised in peer-reviewed articles. A systematic literature search identified 189 papers that either explicitly define or provide conceptual insights on digital identity. Relevant quotes related to digital identity from these papers were extracted as data. Inductive qualitative analysis was used to develop a transdisciplinary definition of digital identity and additional themes encapsulating how digital identity has previously been conceptualised as (1) a fundamental and evolving shift; (2) context-dependent; (3) a resource; and (4) empowering or enslaving. These contributions provide a shared language for interdisciplinary dialogue and a transdisciplinary overview of how digital identity is understood across the literature.