Comparing Generic and Community-Situated Crowdsourcing for Data Validation in the Context of Recovery from Substance Use Disorders
This research provides insights into effective data validation strategies for online recovery communities, which could benefit organizations supporting individuals in recovery from substance use disorders.
The paper compares generic and community-situated crowdsourcing for validating Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting information. It evaluates three recruitment approaches based on time, cost, and task accuracy, finding trade-offs between paid and unpaid community-situated workers.
Targeting the right group of workers for crowdsourcing often achieves better quality results. One unique example of targeted crowdsourcing is seeking community-situated workers whose familiarity with the background and the norms of a particular group can help produce better outcome or accuracy. These community-situated crowd workers can be recruited in different ways from generic online crowdsourcing platforms or from online recovery communities. We evaluate three different approaches to recruit generic and community-situated crowd in terms of the time and the cost of recruitment, and the accuracy of task completion. We consider the context of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), the largest peer support group for recovering alcoholics, and the task of identifying and validating AA meeting information. We discuss the benefits and trade-offs of recruiting paid vs. unpaid community-situated workers and provide implications for future research in the recovery context and relevant domains of HCI, and for design of crowdsourcing ICT systems.