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

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.