The Duality of Empowerment and Marginalization in Microtask Crowdsourcing: A Replication

Abstract

This paper describes an exact replication of a study by Deng, Joshi, & Galliers (2016) of crowd worker values on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) crowdsourcing platform. The original study analyzed 210 MTurk crowd workers’ narratives using value sensitive design (VSD). The results uncovered nine shared values: access, autonomy, fairness, transparency, communication, security, accountability, making an impact, and dignity. Further analysis in the original study revealed four crowdsourcing structures: compensation, governance, technology, and microtask, and duality of crowd worker perceptions, empowerment, and marginalization. This replication study also asked Amazon Mechanical Turk crowd workers questions about their work and used the original study’s findings for a priori codes. However, new values and findings emerged in our results, which offers additional implications for further research regarding microtask crowdsourcing.