To pay or not to pay? handling crowdsourced participants who drop out from a research study

This article examines whether a crowdsourced research participant who quits a study before its completion should receive any monetary compensation. The study is focused on participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, the most widely used crowdsourcing platform, and examines the tensions betwe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Ethics and information technology Vol. 25; no. 3; p. 34
Main Author: Benbunan-Fich, Raquel
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.09.2023
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Compensation
Computer Science
Crowdsourcing
Distributive justice
Ethical dilemmas
Ethics
Innovation/Technology Management
Internet
Labor market
Library Science
Management of Computing and Information Systems
Original Paper
Research ethics
Research subjects
User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction
Crowdsourcing
Ethics
IT Platforms
Online Research
Amazon Mechanical Turk
ISSN:1388-1957, 1572-8439
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This article examines whether a crowdsourced research participant who quits a study before its completion should receive any monetary compensation. The study is focused on participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, the most widely used crowdsourcing platform, and examines the tensions between participants’ rights and research objectives when online labor markets are used to recruit research participants. The discussion is informed by the recent literature on online research with crowdsourced samples, evidence from human subjects’ practices at top US universities, and an ethical analysis based on distributive justice and consequentialism. The results indicate that compensating crowdsourced research subjects who fail to complete their participation jeopardizes the benefits of many who dutifully participate and undermines the overall value of the research enterprise for advancing knowledge. By examining the issue of payment for crowdsourced participants who drop out, this article sheds light on modern ethical issues in online research and offers practical recommendations for researchers and ethics scholars.
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ISSN:1388-1957
1572-8439
DOI:10.1007/s10676-023-09708-8