Crowdsourcing From the Worker’s Perspective
Publication Date: Spring 2023
Abstract
Companies and researchers increasingly rely on crowdsourcing platforms for a variety of core tasks. This paper investigates how organizations can respect the dignity and needs of workers on these platforms, while also improving the quality of the data and insights that they gain. Focusing on the case of sustaining worker engagement in survey studies, the authors fielded a questionnaire that asked Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to share their perspectives on what influences their task completion and whether they return for follow-up studies. Results indicate that monetary incentives, reminder systems, task accessibility, and feelings of obligation and honor all enhance engagement. The authors conclude that researchers should ensure tasks are fairly compensated, craft tasks to be accessible and convenient, and take worker preferences and values into account when designing crowdsourcing tasks.