It’s Not What You Say, It’s What You Do: The Motivation of The Crowd to Participate in a Crowdsourcing Project to Support Blind and Partially Sighted Students

There is a growing interest in crowdsourcing projects for socially responsible issues. One area of socially responsible crowdsourcing is to support people with disabilities. However, there is little exploration of what motivates people to participate in such projects. This programme of research investigated the motivators for students to participate in a socially responsible crowdsourcing project to support blind and partially sighted students by describing images found in digital learning resources. For this purpose a crowdsourcing project, DescribeIT, was developed.
The first study explored what students thought would motivate them to participate in the project to compare with students’ actual behaviour in the following studies. Altruism and monetary rewards were the leading self-reported motivational factors, other factors such as being interested in accessibility were reported.
Studies 2 to 6 investigated the effects of different intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors on students’ participation in the DescribeIT project with students from the UK and Arab countries. Despite the promising results of the self-reports of motivations, UK students’ participation rates in Studies 2 to 4 was extremely low. However, paying UK students small amounts of money (Study 6) did motivate them to participate. Arab students (Study 5) were intrinsically motivated to participate in the DescribeIT project and showed a higher participation rate than UK students.
Studies 7 and 9 investigated the quality of the image descriptions produced by crowd members of established crowdsourcing platforms in comparison to those produced by students. The results showed a comparable quality across descriptions produced by students and crowd members.
Studies 8 and 9 investigated the effect of simplifying the image description task by changing it to an image tagging task and showed that making the task easier increased participation rate. Lastly, Study 10 investigated the effect of a face-to-face training session on image description quality. It also investigated the effect of quality control instructions on quality. The face-to-face training increased description quality, but different quality control instructions did not.
The practical implications of this research for crowdsourcers in socially responsible crowdsourcing contexts, are that they need to consider the cultural backgrounds of their potential crowd, make the task easy to do, offer small payments if possible and train crowd members in order to produce good quality work. The theoretical implications are a greater understanding of the motivations of crowd members in socially responsible projects and the importance of measuring both self-reports of motivation and actual behaviour.