Beyond online participant crowdsourcing: The benefits and opportunities of big team addiction science

Charlotte Rebecca Pennington, Andrew Jones, Loukia Tzavella, Chris Chambers, Katharine Button

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Participant crowdsourcing platforms (e.g., MTurk, Prolific) offer numerous advantages to addiction science, permitting access to hard-to-reach populations and enhancing the feasibility of complex experimental, longitudinal and intervention studies. Yet these are met with equal concerns about participant non-naivety, motivation, and careless responding, which if not considered can greatly compromise data quality. In this article, we discuss an alternative crowdsourcing avenue that overcomes these issues whilst presenting its own unique advantages – crowdsourcing researchers through big team science. First, we review several contemporary efforts within psychology (e.g., ManyLabs, Psychological Science Accelerator) and the benefits these would yield if they were more widely implemented in addiction science. We then outline our own consortium-based approach to empirical dissertations: a grassroots initiative that trains students in reproducible big team addiction science. In doing so, we discuss potential challenges and their remedies, as well as providing resources to help addiction researchers develop these initiatives. Through researcher crowdsourcing, together we can answer fundamental scientific questions about substance use and addiction, build a literature that is representative of a diverse population of researchers and participants, and ultimately achieve our goal of promoting better global health.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)444-451
Number of pages8
JournalExperimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology
Volume30
Issue number4
Early online date13 Jan 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

Bibliographical note

This preprint is licenced under a CC BY licence. © 2021 American Psychological Association. Pennington, C. R., Jones, A. J., Tzavella, L., Chambers, C. D., & Button, K. S. (2022). Beyond online participant crowdsourcing: The benefits and opportunities of big team addiction science. Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/pha0000541

Keywords

  • Addiction science
  • Big team science
  • Crowdsourcing
  • Open science
  • Researcher consortia

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