HealthInsights
An Online Conversational Survey for Understanding Worker Health in Crowdsourcing Platforms
Sihang Qiu (TU Delft - Web Information Systems)
Ujwal Gadiraju (TU Delft - Web Information Systems)
Xiaolong Zheng (Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
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Abstract
Crowdsourcing marketplaces have gradually flourished over the last decade. With the growing landscape of online work in general, and the rise of paid microtask crowdsourcing in particular, the health and wellbeing of crowd workers has become an important concern. In this paper, we present an online conversational survey, named HealthInsights, for understanding the status quo of workers’ health-related background, physical health, mental health, and their needs. We carried out a study on two popular platforms - Mechanical Turk and Prolific. Results show that the survey has acceptable reliability and validity. We found that workers across these platforms reported similar health-related issues, but also exhibited certain differences. Based on our findings, we argue that crowdsourcing platforms, task requesters, and academic researchers need to take the collective responsibility of creating better work environments. Our work has important implications on task and workflow design that are centered around worker health on crowdsourcing platforms.