Dynamic changes in motivation in collaborative citizen-science projects

Rotman, Dana; Preece, Jenny; Hammock, Jennifer; Procita, Kezee; Hansen, Derek L.; Parr, Cynthia; Lewis, Darcy; Jacobs, David W.

doi:10.1145/2145204.2145238

Cited by 367 publications

(505 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…The importance of interest in the topic has been seen elsewhere, for example, in the research conducted by Evans, Abrams, & Reitsma (2005) which relied upon the citizen scientists' inherent interest in their local area when collecting data about birds in the environment nearby. Other studies have shown that reasons for engagement in such studies can change over the course of a study, and are affected by the levels of interaction between researchers and citizen scientists (Rotman et al, 2012). All agree that the sense of contribution is important along with an interest in the subject.…”

Section: Citizen Sciencementioning

confidence: 95%

Exploring the effects of non-monetary reimbursement for participants in HCI research

Wiseman

Cox

Gould

et al. 2017

HCj

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When running experiments within the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) it is common practice to ask participants to come to a specified lab location, and reimburse them monetarily for their time and travel costs. This, however, is not the only means by which to encourage participation in scientific study. Citizen science projects, which encourage the public to become involved in scientific research, have had great success in getting people to act as sensors to collect data or to volunteer their idling computer or brain power to classify large data sets across a broad range of fields including biology, cosmology and physical and environmental science. This is often done without the expectation of payment. Additionally, data collection need not be done on behalf of an external researcher; the Quantified Self (QS) movement allows people to reflect on data they have collected about themselves. This too, then, is a form of non-reimbursed data collection. Here we investigate whether citizen HCI scientists and those interested in personal data produce reliable results compared to participants in more traditional lab-based studies. Through six studies, we explore how participation rates and data quality are affected by recruiting participants without monetary reimbursement: either by providing participants with data about themselves as reward (a QS approach), or by simply requesting help with no extrinsic reward (as in citizen science projects). We show that people are indeed willing to take part in online HCI research in the absence of extrinsic monetary reward, and that the data generated by participants who take part for selfless reasons, rather than for monetary reward, can be as high quality as data gathered in the lab and in addition may be of higher quality than data generated by participants given monetary reimbursement online. This suggests that large HCI experiments could be run online in the future, without having to incur the equally large reimbursement costs alongside the possibility of running experiments in environments outside of the lab.

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Section: Citizen Sciencementioning

confidence: 95%

Exploring the effects of non-monetary reimbursement for participants in HCI research

Wiseman

Cox

Gould

et al. 2017

HCj

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“…However, the engagement is dynamic and may evolve during the citizen's involvement period. For example, what drives someone one day to volunteer may not keep doing it tomorrow (Rotman et al, 2012). Bonney et al (2009) proposed three different approaches, defined as contributory, collaborative and co-created.…”

Section: Data Assimilationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving Flood Prediction Assimilating Uncertain Crowdsourced Data into Hydrological and Hydraulic Models

Mazzoleni¹

2017

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“…2011 • Helping others and feeling part of a team (Raddick et al, 2010;Nov et al,. 2010;Rotman et al, 2012;Nov et al, 2013;Iacovides et al, 2013;Reed et al, 2013). …”

Section: 1mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…• Receiving recognition and feedback (Rotman et al, 2012;Causer & Wallace, 2012;Iacovides et al, 2013;Eveleigh et al, 2014;Eveleigh et al, 2014 found that "I am excited to contribute to original scientific research" was the largest primary motivation, selected by 40% of their respondents. We choose to highlight this study because they collected survey responses from almost 11,000 Galaxy Zoo volunteers -to our knowledge this is the largest sample size for a study exploring motivations to date.…”

Section: 1mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Rotman et al (2012) found that volunteers' initial interest in ecological citizen science projects stemmed from elements related to egoism, such as personal curiosity or previous engagement in science projects. Following their initial engagement, volunteers' ongoing participation was affected by factors such as recognition, attribution, feedback, community involvement and advocacy.…”

Section: 1mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Exploring Citizen Psych-Science and the Motivations of Errordiary Volunteers

Jennett

Furniss

Iacovides

et al. 2014

HCj

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Although virtual citizen science projects have the potential to engage large networks of people in science research, seeding and maintaining such networks can be difficult. A feature of successful projects is that they have well-motivated volunteers. What makes volunteers motivated rather than apathetic? In this paper we focus on projects that contribute to psychology research, which we term 'citizen psych-science'. This differs from typical citizen science because volunteers are asked to contribute themselves as data. We describe research studies that we conducted with Errordiary -a citizen psych-science project where volunteers tweet about their everyday experiences of human error. These studies were: (1) an interview study, to explore the motivations of eight Errordiary volunteers; and (2) three focus groups, to explore the potential of attracting new communities to Errordiary. We found that the personal nature of the data can influence participation in positive and negative ways. We suggest several factors that scientists need to consider when encouraging citizen psych-science volunteers to contribute their personal experiences towards research.

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Dynamic changes in motivation in collaborative citizen-science projects

Cited by 367 publications

References 23 publications

Exploring the effects of non-monetary reimbursement for participants in HCI research

Exploring the effects of non-monetary reimbursement for participants in HCI research

Improving Flood Prediction Assimilating Uncertain Crowdsourced Data into Hydrological and Hydraulic Models

Exploring Citizen Psych-Science and the Motivations of Errordiary Volunteers

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