Comparing Generic and Community-Situated Crowdsourcing for Data Validation in the Context of Recovery from Substance Use Disorders

TL;DR

This paper compares the effectiveness and efficiency of generic versus community-situated crowdsourcing approaches for data validation within Alcoholics Anonymous, highlighting trade-offs in recruitment methods and accuracy.

Contribution

It evaluates three recruitment strategies for generic and community-situated crowdsourcing in the recovery context, analyzing their costs, time, and accuracy implications.

Findings

Community-situated workers improve data accuracy.

Paid recruitment yields faster results but higher costs.

Unpaid community workers can be cost-effective with comparable accuracy.

Abstract

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.