Hello,

I am a USC graduate student conducting research on iStockphoto users. If you are an iStockphoto contributor and would like to be entered into a drawing to win a $20 Amazon gift card, please take this survey:

https://usc.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_bfq5OXfNAouvDMw

Thank you in advance! I appreciate your participation.

Uhhh am I missing something here? How can you win a Amazon gift card if no personal data is recorded? Sounds rather fishy to me.

"Thank you for taking the time to participate in this survey. The following questions are related to crowdsourcing communities and the individuals who participate in crowdsourcing projects and activities. Your participation is entirely voluntary and no personal data will be recorded. The survey should take between 5-10 minutes to complete. "

strange survey

 Think of the opportunities for promotion that you have now. How well does each of the following words or phrases describe these? Rank your answer choice using the range of boxes next to the description.

Good opportunities for promotion                                
Opportunities somewhat limited                                
Dead-end job                                
Good chance for promotion                                
Regular promotions                                
Fairly good chance for promotion

arent these pretty much the same thing?

That's rather a poorly crafted survey. I find it hard to believe there is any way of extracting useful and quantifiable data from those questions. Unless of course you just want a count of people stating: 'I am proud to be part of the iStockphoto community.', in which case, you should have taken the survey last month then followed up with a re-run this month

To be fair, I couldn't have done much better when I was a student (I was too busy watching Star Trek mainly). Though a few years 'in industry' teaches quite easily what slacking around a college campus never could about doing thorough research before approaching your audience

Becky, I'd suggest first trolling the boards here for a while and you'll find the REAL picture on what it is to be an iStock (or general Microstock) contributor. Granted it's not all nice datapoints at first, but there are several simple text analysis techniques which would get you what you're after without having to resort to a highly unbalanced survey.
For a start, check out Tylers annual microstock charts, then dive around the forums and see how many times various 'leaning keywords' crop up. I'd start by measuring instances of the word 'shafted'

mean people live here.

Why mean? If I was doing a project that I would be graded on, I'd appreciate being told that there were serious flaws in my process. It would give me a chance to possibly salvage my grade! 

Quote from: Xalanx on October 12, 2010, 04:33

mean people live here.

Why mean? If I was doing a project that I would be graded on, I'd appreciate being told that there were serious flaws in my process. It would give me a chance to possibly salvage my grade! 

That's what I was thinking. Maybe we could help it fly instead of just letting it crash and burn.

Hi all,

Thank you for your participation and responses.

The survey is actually being submitted to three "crowdsourcing" sites: Amazon Mechanical Turk, InnoCentive and iStockphoto. We are testing the motivations for participation in crowdsourcing. The employment questions come from two renowned job satisfaction scales that have been used and refined since the 1969. If you would like to read more about them, please visit: newbielink:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_satisfaction [nonactive] or newbielink:http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/psych/io/jdi/. [nonactive] The questions used in this survey are the "abridged" version. If I could choose, I would modify the language used in these scales, as I think a lot of the wording is similar in meaning. However, the project requires that we use tested and verified measures.

The results from the three sites will be compared to each other to test job satisfaction and participation, online community structure with participation and money motivations and participation. The aim is to suggest a few reasons why people may participate in a) crowdsourcing projects or b) online communities.

In the case of Amazon Turk, I hypothesize that people participate for money/income reasons where as iStockphoto members participate because it offers a venue for their work, a community and the opportunity to make money. InnoCentive is a different animal in that it offers large monetary rewards for participation (some are around $50,000!) and seeks scientific solutions that may require large amounts of time that one who has a fulltime job may not be able to devote. The differences between the three survey results is where the value in this project lies.

I admit that the survey is not perfect; however, for the purposes of this project I wanted to keep it short. All of the questions have actually been used in professional settings and/or published academic papers. I did not come up with any of them, as I would not be able to justify their validity. Also, there is a blank field where a respondent can enter his or her specific reasons for participation.

If you would like to read an article about iStockphoto and motivations for participation, this paper is pretty interesting: newbielink:http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2159/1969 [nonactive]

Again, thank you for your participation and your comments. iStockphoto will not let me post to their forum and will not respond to my inquires so I've been forced to use more guerilla-type tactics to access the iStockphoto userbase.

Entering your e-mail address is optional, and I won't be saving the e-mail address.

Becky