Wiki surveys: Open and quantifiable social data collection

TL;DR

Wiki surveys are an innovative hybrid data collection method inspired by Wikipedia and traditional surveys, enabling open, adaptive, and collaborative social data gathering that yields unique insights.

Contribution

This paper introduces wiki surveys as a new research instrument combining open-ended and quantifiable data collection, with methods demonstrated through case studies.

Findings

Pairwise wiki surveys provide insights difficult to obtain with traditional methods.

Wiki surveys are greedy, collaborative, and adaptive, enhancing data richness.

Case studies show the effectiveness of wiki surveys in social science research.

Abstract

In the social sciences, there is a longstanding tension between data collection methods that facilitate quantification and those that are open to unanticipated information. Advances in technology now enable new, hybrid methods that combine some of the benefits of both approaches. Drawing inspiration from online information aggregation systems like Wikipedia and from traditional survey research, we propose a new class of research instruments called wiki surveys. Just as Wikipedia evolves over time based on contributions from participants, we envision an evolving survey driven by contributions from respondents. We develop three general principles that underlie wiki surveys: they should be greedy, collaborative, and adaptive. Building on these principles, we develop methods for data collection and data analysis for one type of wiki survey, a pairwise wiki survey. Using two proof-of-concept case studies involving our free and open-source website www.allourideas.org, we show that pairwise wiki surveys can yield insights that would be difficult to obtain with other methods.