Older Adults' Motivation and Engagement with Diverse Crowdsourcing Citizen Science Tasks

TL;DR

This study explores how older adults engage with diverse citizen science microtasks, analyzing their motivations, performance, and preferences to inform better task design and enhance participation.

Contribution

It provides new insights into older adults' motivations and preferences for crowdsourcing tasks, offering guidelines for designing age-friendly citizen science projects.

Findings

Older adults are motivated by meaningful and manageable tasks.

Performance varies across different task types.

Design considerations can significantly enhance engagement.

Abstract

In this exploratory study we evaluated the engagement, performance and preferences of older adults who interacted with different citizen science tasks. Out of 40 projects recently active on the Zooniverse platform we selected top ones to be represented by 8 diverse, yet standardized, microtasks, 2 in each category of image, audio, text and pattern recognition. Next, 33 older adults performed these microtasks at home and evaluated each task right after its completion to, finally, share what could encourage them to engage with such tasks in their free time. Based on the results we draw preliminary conclusions regarding older adults' motivations for engaging with such crowdsourcing tasks and suggest some guidelines for task design while discussing interesting avenues for further inquiry in the area of crowdsourcing for older adults.