Exploring the Motives of Citizen Reporting Engagement: Self-Concern and Other-Orientation

Abstract

In smart city contexts, voluntary citizen reporting can be a particularly valuable source of information for local authorities. A key question in this regard is what motivates citizens to contribute their data. Drawing on motivation research in social psychology, the paper examines the question of whether self-concern or otherorientation is a stronger driver of citizen reporting engagement. To test their hypotheses, the authors rely on a sample of users from the mobile application ''Zurich as good as new'' in Switzerland, which enables citizens to report damages in and other issues with the city's infrastructure. Data was collected from two different sources: motivation was assessed in an online user survey (n = 650), whereas citizen reporting engagement was measured by the number of reports per user from real platform-use data. The analysis was carried out using negative binomial regression. The findings suggest that both self-concern and other-orientation are significant drivers of citizen reporting engagement, although the effect of self-concern appears to be stronger in comparison. As such, this study contributes to a better understanding of what motivates citizens to participate in citizen reporting platforms, which are a cornerstone application in many smart cities.

Noise and the city: Leveraging crowdsourced big data to examine the spatio-temporal relationship between urban development and noise annoyance

“…graffiti removal) that are more driven by motivations for participating in government programs (O'Brien et al, 2016). For noise complaints, past work has shown that selfmotivation to reduce personal harm may be stronger than other motivations (Abu-Tayeh et al, 2018). However, this statement is complicated by other research that has shown that those who are economically dependent upon the noise source are less likely to report an annoyance (Miedema and Vos, 1999).…”

Citizen Science in Information Systems Research

“…• Participatory Design (e.g., Qaurooni et al 2016; Simonofski et al 2019) • Co-Creation (e.g., Haki et al 2019) • User-centered Design (e.g., Grace et al 2015) • User-generated Content (e.g., Tilly et al 2017) • Design Science (e.g., Mueller et al 2018) • Crowdsourcing/Crowd-Reporting (e.g., Abu-Tayeh et al 2018;Niemeyer et al 2018;Schoder et al 2014) • Open Innovation (e.g., Smart et al 2019) • Gamification (e.g., Zhou et al 2017) • Ethics, e.g., regarding Privacy (e.g., Krasnova et al 2012; Peukert and Kloker 2020)…”

“…Second, we need to attract citizens to our theories, methods, tools, research questions, and fields of interest – basically our knowledge. This will not be possible for all of our work, but let us highlight some methods and fields of research in IS that, inherently, seem fit to this context and which have been addressed (in a related context), among others, in the BISE journal: Participatory Design (e.g., Qaurooni et al 2016 ; Simonofski et al 2019 ) Co - Creation (e.g., Haki et al 2019 ) User - centered Design (e.g., Grace et al 2015 ) User - generated Content (e.g., Tilly et al 2017 ) Design Science (e.g., Mueller et al 2018 ) Crowdsourcing/Crowd - Reporting (e.g., Abu-Tayeh et al 2018 ; Niemeyer et al 2018 ; Schoder et al 2014 ) Open Innovation (e.g., Smart et al 2019 ) Gamification (e.g., Zhou et al 2017 ) Ethics, e.g., regarding Privacy (e.g., Krasnova et al 2012 ; Peukert and Kloker 2020 ) To foster citizen science projects in IS research, we need to increase the interest of our citizens for these kinds of mechanisms. They should not only be interested in using them, but also to research them: invent, test, and evaluate their own mechanisms for, e.g., gamification or crowdfunding – and do so in cooperation with professional researchers.…”

“…Crowdsourcing/Crowd - Reporting (e.g., Abu-Tayeh et al 2018 ; Niemeyer et al 2018 ; Schoder et al 2014 )…”

Technology helping Citizens to express their Needs and Improve their Neighborhood

“…(11), non-emergency reporting system (5) [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [21], [28], [30], [31], [32], [34], [35], [36], [43], [45], [49] 3. Problem solved city issues(2), urban incident(2), public infrastructure defect(1), maintenance(2), urban issues(1), civic issues(2), utilities(1), urban fault(1), pothole(1), daily life issues(1), local public service (1) [2], [3], [4], [5], [11], [16], [19], [24], [27], [29], [37], [46], [47], [50], [51], [54], [55] 4. Activity related to citizens citizen sourcing(8), urban sensing(5), citizen reporting(16), requests and complaints(2), citizen participation(7), citizen engagement(2), crowdsourcing(5), tracking(1), social reporting(1), we-government(1), feedback (2) [1], [3], [4], [11], [13], [14], [19], [22], [26], [27], [30],…”