Rationale and Study Checklist for Ethical Rejection of Participants on Crowdsourcing Research Platforms

• Published in: Ethics & human research Vol. 46; no. 4; pp. 38 - 46
• Main Authors: Agley, Jon, Mumaw, Casey, Johnson, Bethany
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 01.07.2024
• Subjects: Checklist; crowdsourcing; Crowdsourcing - ethics; Data Accuracy; Ethics Committees, Research; Ethics, Research; human subjects research; Humans; institutional review board (IRB); MTurk; Patient Selection - ethics; quality control in research; research ethics; research participants; Research Personnel - ethics; research participants; MTurk; institutional review board (IRB); crowdsourcing; human subjects research; research ethics; quality control in research
• ISSN: 2578-2355; 2578-2363
• DOI: 10.1002/eahr.500217

ABSTRACT Online participant recruitment (“crowdsourcing”) platforms are increasingly being used for research studies. While such platforms can rapidly provide access to large samples, there are concomitant concerns around data quality. Researchers have studied and demonstrated means to reduce the prevalence of low‐quality data from crowdsourcing platforms, but approaches to doing so often involve rejecting work and/or denying payment to participants, which can pose ethical dilemmas. We write this essay as an associate professor and two institutional review board (IRB) directors to provide a perspective on the competing interests of participants/workers and researchers and to propose a checklist of steps that we believe may support workers' agency on the platform and lessen instances of unfair consequences to them while enabling researchers to definitively reject lower‐quality work that might otherwise reduce the likelihood of their studies producing true results. We encourage further, explicit discussion of these issues among academics and among IRBs.