2020 Virtual undergraduate Research symposium

Crowdsourcing as a Tool for Research: Ethical, Political, and Methodological Considerations


PROJECT NUMBER: 62

AUTHOR: Hanzelle Kleeman, Mechanical Engineering | MENTOR: Qin Zhu, Humanities and Social Sciences

 

ABSTRACT

Crowdsourcing platforms (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk, Figure Eight, Clickworker, etc.) have recently become powerful tools for researchers in the social, psychological, behavioral, and computer sciences. Proponents of using these platforms claim that they possess certain strengths compared to existing tools for data collection. For example, crowdsourcing platforms can help researchers quickly recruit enough human subjects with diverse cultural backgrounds at a low cost to generate significant statistical power. However, critical computing scholars have also expressed serious concerns about the use of crowdsourcing platforms in research, such as privacy violations, labor exploitation, and data quality. To better understand these concerns, this paper starts with a brief introduction to the history of crowdsourcing as a tool for research. It then summarizes the alleged strengths of crowdsourcing as suggested by its proponents. This paper then conceptualizes the concerns about crowdsourcing as a data collection tool in three different dimensions: methodological (e.g., different researchers are likely reaching many of the same participants, participants may have previously been exposed to a similar experi- mental manipulation), ethical (e.g., workers are not paid fairly, crowdsourcing platforms become “digital sweat- shops”), and political (e.g., unbalanced power dynamic between job requesters and workers, workers are treat- ed as “cogs in a machine” rather than digital citizens). Finally, this paper examines the possible resolutions pro- posed by critical computing scholars to address the concerns about crowdsourcing as a research tool, and dis- cusses potential challenges with implementing these resolutions.

 

VISUAL PRESENTATION

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

https://www.egaliteonline.org/projects.html

 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Hanzelle Kleeman is a third-year student at Mines studying Mechanical Engineering and Public Affairs. Her academic interests are diverse, but she is particularly interested in the social, economic, and political intricacies of different engineering problems. Hanzelle’s work with the Engineering Grand Challenges Program and Dr. Zhu’s research team has driven her to dive deeper into the long-term impact of design decisions. In doing so, Hanzelle hopes to gain a better understanding of technology’s role in society.

 


1 Comment

  1. Great work, it really brings up a lot of good points.
    How did you go about determining the concerns that you have listed?

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