Crowdsourcing Practices in Applied Social Research

<p style="text-align: justify;">The subject of this master&#39;s thesis research is crowdsourcing practices in applied social research. The purpose of this paper is to identify the specifics and classify practices of crowdsourcing in applied social research. This purpose was divided on several tasks: to describe the key characteristics and the normative model of applied social research; to analyze the approaches to the definition of crowdsourcing and to refine the place that crowdsourcing takes in applied social research; to classify the ways of crowdsourcing usage in applied social research; to analyze crowdsourcing practices that do not fit within the boundaries of our classification.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Empirical research of this study is based on the document analysis and case study. Empirical base for the document analysis included 50 selected documentary sources that describe crowdsourcing practices in applied social research. To conduct a case study 11 interviews with organizers and participants of selected crowdsourcing project were collected, as well as secondary data and documents that illustrate the content of the case.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">As a result, the study proved that in the context of applied social research crowdsourcing is a logistical operation that ensures the implementation of research procedures. Crowdsourcing practices in applied social research were classified on three grounds: a type of realized research procedure, a type of ICT-mediator, a type of solving task. Case study of the &laquo;Kak sdelat luchshe Nashe Podmoskovie!&raquo; project showed that technology of such crowdsourcing projects can be attributed to a variety of so-called market research online communities or MROC. At the same time, the activity of the participants in such crowdsourcing projects is likely to be a hybrid procedure that has certain similarities with several research methods such as online survey, online focus groups and existing techniques for expert estimates collecting.&nbsp;</p>