Contributions' Quantity and Quality.

The success of TMSP projects depends not only on the amount of users' contribution, but also on its quality [20]. Quality, in this context is “a degree of excellence of what is produced”, whereas quantity “refers to the total amount of what is produced” ([21] p. 53). While both quantity and quality important, research on the factors underlying TMSP has primarily focused on the quantity of contribution, whereas the drivers of quality have been underexplored, perhaps because the subjective nature of quality and the difficulty to measure it.

Prior applied psychology research has revealed the tradeoff between quantity and quality as a fundamental characteristic of human performance in cognitive tasks [21]–[23]. Although both of these dimensions of human performance are often desirable, due to the limited cognitive resources and information processing capability of an individual they are not always in harmony, as observed in the context of information processing tasks [24] and goal directed behaviors [22], as well as in the context of TMSP (examples include prior studies of discussion forums [20] and online product reviews [14]).

Our study focuses on motivation as an antecedent of both the quantity and quality of contribution to citizen science projects. Empirical evidence suggests that motivational factors may exert differential effects on quantity and quality of contribution in online communities. For example, a study of professional networks of practice found that in the context of an online discussion forum, expectations of reciprocity had a significant effect only on contribution quantity, whereas altruism influenced the quality of contributions [25]. Other studies found that social affiliation, utilitarian motives, and self-expression only affected the quantity of online product reviews submitted, while altruism, reciprocity, and skill development had a significant effect on quality [14]. A related construct - commitment to the community – was shown to have a positive effect on the quantity of photos posted to a photo sharing community, while self-development motives affected the quality of contribution [26]. It is therefore expected that motivational factors exert differential effects on quality and quantity in online citizen science projects.

Motivational Factors Affecting Contributions' Quantity.

Sustained participation and the sharing of individuals' knowledge are critical for the viability of all online communities [27], [28], and thus an understanding of contributors' motivations for participation [29] is essential for successfully designing and managing TMSP efforts [30], [31]. In recent years, a growing number of studies have investigated volunteers' incentives for sharing information across a wide range of online communities, such as open source projects, Flickr, Twitter, and Wikipedia [1]. Some of the important factors that were found to affect participation include the improvement of skills and enhancement of status [16], [32], enjoyment [19], reciprocity [25], identification with contributors' community [11], [15], and group level factors such as social network properties [33] and group membership size [27].

Within the context of online citizen science, research on motivations for participation is still in an early phase and empirical evidence is scarce. Holohan and Garg [34] studied the motivations for participating in volunteer computing projects and contributing one's computer resources to SETI@home. They found the most salient motivational factors to be the desire to help scientific research, reputation, and gaining technical knowledge, while social factors (being part of team and maintaining social ties) had only secondary importance. A study of motivation for participation in the analysis of galaxy images performed at the Galaxy Zoo project identified ten motivational categories, including: excitement, learning, desire to discover, social interaction, use the project as a resource for [8] teaching, the beauty of the images, fun, amazement by vast scale of the universe, desire to help, interest in the project, interest in astronomy, and interest in science in general. Both these studies provide a descriptive analysis of contributors' motivation, but no attempt is made to link motivations to behavior. A study of SETI@home volunteers [35] on the other hand, developed a research model of the factors determining volunteer computing users' contribution. The results of testing the model exposed personal enhancement and team affiliations to be positively related to computing resource contribution. Overall, however, prior studies have focused on (a) single setting contribution, and (b) contribution quantity rather than quality. What seems to be missing is a broader study of different citizen science settings, focusing on both quantity and quality of contribution.

Motivational Factors Affecting Contributions' Quality.

A study among authors of Amazon consumer reviews [14] found altruism and reciprocity to be positively related to reviews' quality, whereas a study of Flickr users [26] found the motivation of learning to be positively related to contribution quality. In a more work-related setting, a study of the motivational factors associated with postings in a professional network of practice [25] found that reputation and enjoyment in helping others were positively related with the helpfulness of the postings as perceived by their recipients.

Motivation for social participation.

Research on participation in social movements has a long tradition in the social sciences [29], [36], [37]. Social movements can be defined from a psychological point of view, as “effort[s] by a large number of people to solve collectively a problem that they feel they have in common” ([38], p. 5). Traditional social movements and technology-mediated social participation are all based on fundamental principle of voluntary contributions made as part of a collective effort, explain why theories of social movement participation have been used in the study of TMSP [11], [15].

A theoretical framework that integrates central findings from social movement research has been developed by Klandermans [39], [40]. According to this framework, the motivation or willingness to participate in a social movement is viewed as a function of the expected costs and benefits from participation. Since the goals of such movements often benefit members of the public regardless of whether they participated in the collective action, the achievement of the goal may be insufficient as a motivating force in and of itself (resulting in social loafing or lurking in online communities). Individuals are therefore likely to have other reasons for participating, which can involve both social and material costs and benefits. Klandermans describes three motives for participation in social movement, with each of the three reflecting a different type of expected cost or benefit: (a) collective motives associated with the importance one attributes to the collective goals of the movement; (b) social motives resulting from expectations regarding the reactions of important others - such as friends, family or colleagues – to one's participation; and (c) reward motives linked to potential benefits to be gained from participation, such as gaining reputation, or making new friends. All three motives are assumed to contribute positively to the willingness to participate in collective action organized by the social movement.

Our study extends the social movement participation model by drawing on Self-Determination Theory [41], in line with recent studies of motivation within TMSP [11]. At the most fundamental level, SDT contrasts extrinsic motivation (in which individuals engage a task in order to achieve a desired outcome) with intrinsic motivation (in which individuals engage in a task out of interest or enjoyment). While Klandermans' discussion of reward motives emphasizes extrinsic rewards [39], [40], intrinsic motives represent an alternative type of reward and were found to play an important role in TMSP [11], [15], [42]. Thus, we include both types of reward motives in our study of citizen science. In order to provide a clear focus, we use in our study one specific type of extrinsic factor, reputation, as this factor has been shown to be an important driver of participation within TMSP in a variety of projects [25], [43], [44]. For clarity reasons, and in line with [15], we refer to the motives related to the expected reactions of important others such as family and friends as norm-oriented motives.

In sum, the framework used in our study includes these four motivational factors – collective motives, norm-oriented motives, intrinsic rewards, and reputation - as antecedents of both the quantity and quality of participation in online citizen science projects.

Hypotheses Development.

Collective motives have been found to be important factors in social movements [39] and volunteering [45]. For instance, Simon and colleagues [46] report on two studies of social movements where collective motive had a significant effect on the willingness to participate. In the context of TMSP, however, the effects of collective motives have been less consistent. In Wikipedia, Nov [12] reported statistically insignificant correlation between Wikipedia ideology and participation, and similarly, Schroer and Hertel [11] found the effect of collective motives on engagement to be insignificant. In the context of OSS development, on the other hand, collective motives seem to be more salient. Lakhani and Wolf [16] found that a third of OSS developers studied considered collective motives important. Hertel and colleagues [15] reported that collective motives had a significant effect of on “the willingness to be involved in the future” in OSS contribution. In citizen science, similarly to OSS development, participation is organized around projects, each having a distinct goal, and a collective identity that is derived from the project's goal and ideology. For example, participants in the Stardust@home project refer to themselves as “dusters”. Such high identification with the project's ideology is often a key determining factor in volunteers' decision to join a project, as well as a driver of ongoing participation. In line with the effects observed in open source projects [15], [16], we therefore expect that collective motives in citizen science projects will have positive impact on the quantity of participants' contributions. Formally stated:

H1a: Higher level of collective motive will be associated with greater contribution quantity.

Collective motives can also influence the quality of contribution. While the notion of ‘quality of contribution' is not directly applicable to social movements (for which the Klandermans model was originally intended), and the antecedents of contribution quality in TMSP have also been underexplored, there is some evidence suggesting that when contributors share the projects' values their contribution to it will be of a higher quality. For example, in OSS development, values associated with the project, such as sharing information and helping others, were found to be related to trust and quality of communication among contributors, which were in turn related to project success [47]. We, thus, expect collective motives to affect quality of contributions in citizen science projects, and we hypothesize:

H1b: Higher level of collective motive will not be associated with a higher contribution quality.

Social norms play an important part in enforcing participation in support communities [48] and social movements [39], [49]. In addition, the Information Systems literature shows a positive relation between subjective norms (i.e. the perceived social pressure to engage or not to engage in a behavior) and intended usage behavior [49]. However, empirical evidence of the effects of social norms on volunteering is mixed. For example, Piliavin et al. [50] found that individuals donate blood due to external, social motives, while Simon et al. [46] found in both his studies of participation in social movements that norm-oriented motives had only a marginally significant effect on the ‘willingness to participate’; finally, Houle et al. [51] found that the salience of norm-oriented motives differs between volunteering tasks. Such mixed evidence is also apparent in studies of TMSP. For example, norm-oriented motives did not have a significant effect of the willingness to be involved in the future in OSS projects [15], nor did they have a significant effect on Wikipedia engagement [11].

We believe that the mixed evidence of the effect of norm-oriented motives could be attributed – at least to some extent – to an under-specification of the outcome variable. Perceived social pressure from important others, such as friends and family members, could encourage one to register and contribute to a project from which everyone can benefit, but are less likely induce the kind of commitment, enthusiasm and sustained effort that are necessary for making high-quality contribution. In other words, individuals whose participation is driven primarily by perceived social pressure may not be doing their best as far as contribution quality goes. Such a basic level of participation may be sufficient for an individual to communicate to important others that he is now also a member of their volunteer project. We, thus, expect that norm-oriented motives may affect the quantity of contributions made to online citizen science projects, but not the quality. Formally stated:

H2a: Higher level of norm-oriented motives will be associated with a higher contribution quantity.

H2b: Higher level of norm-oriented motives will not be associated with a higher quality of contribution.

Social exchange theory [52] posits that individuals engage in social interaction based on an expectation that it will lead in some way to social rewards such as approval, status, and respect. Specifically, reputation is an important asset that an individual can leverage to achieve and maintain status within a collective [53] and one way in which an individual can benefit from active participation in group activity is through the enhancements of his personal reputation. In corporate settings, results from prior research on electronic networks of practice provide evidence that building reputation is a strong motivator for active participation [54]. In the context of social movements and voluntarism, perceived individual costs and benefits associated with the voluntary engagement are an important driver of participation [39]. For example, Gidron [55] found that young volunteers tended to view their volunteer work as a self-development experience, and Beale [56] suggested that students are interested in volunteering as a stepping stone to employment.

Prior TMSP research demonstrates the enhancement of personal status in the community is associated with the amount of participation in online communities [19], [57], as well as in OSS development [16], [42]. In online citizen science projects, volunteers' level of participation is often measured and presented to the contributor and to other volunteers. These measures commonly take into consideration both the quality and quantity of contribution and are a useful tool for enticing participation. For example, Starust@home displays on the project website a list of the top 100 project volunteers by their score - the number of images classified correctly minus the number of images classified incorrectly, and BOINC provides details of the quantity of computing resources contributed by volunteers over time. We therefore anticipate that:

H3a: Higher level of reputation will be associated with a higher quantity of contribution.

H3b: Higher level of reputation will be associated with a higher quality of contribution.

Enjoyment has been established as one of the prominent factors explaining volunteering and charitable behavior [58] and is part of the personal benefits to participation in social movements [39]. In the context of online communities, enjoying the act of sharing has been shown to be a prominent reason for contributing to OSS projects ([15], [16], [42], [59], Wikipedia [11], [12] and Amazon online consumer reviews [14]. We, therefore propose:

Hypothesis 4a: Higher level of intrinsic motivation will be associated with a higher quantity of contribution.

While the enjoyment associated with contribution is likely to drive volunteers to increase their volume of activity, it is not clear that enjoyment would enhance the quality of output in the context of online citizen science. The tasks performed by volunteers at TMSP projects are often mundane tasks in which quality work requires the investment of additional effort, paying special attention to detail, and satisfying certain requirements of the task that may not be enjoyable. As a consequence, intrinsic motives are unlikely to be associated with enhanced quality. For example, the main task at Stardust@home involves watching images, searching for signs of very small interstellar dust particles. Because of the nature of volunteers' tasks in online citizen science, we expect that intrinsic motivation would not lead to enhanced quality of contribution, and we hypothesize:

Hypothesis 4b: Higher level of intrinsic motivation will not be associated with a higher quality of contribution.

Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are not additive as standard economics assumes; rather, there is a complex relationship between the two, often involving crowding effects [60]–[63]. Crowding effects can be subdivided into a crowding out and a crowding in effect. The crowding out effect involves a negative relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and is typical of settings where external incentives are perceived to exert control over members of an organization, such that self-determination is reduced and intrinsic motivation is undermined. The crowding in effect, on the other hand, involves a positive relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. An outside intervention through rewards or feedback strengthens intrinsic motivation in a trusting environment when members' relationship with the organization are reciprocal and their goals are aligned, such that the intervention is perceived to support intrinsic motivation. Prior studies provide substantial empirical evidence for both types of crowding effects [64], [65].

Crowding-in effects has been reported in the study of how constitutional and legal rules affect citizens [64]. Intrinsic motivation and civic virtue are bolstered when public laws convey the notion that citizens are trusted, such that citizens hold extensive rights, determine their own participation and can organize to influence decision-making processes. Crowding effects have not been studied in the context of citizen science projects. Nonetheless, given that citizen science projects normally assume that volunteer contributors are trusted and that these volunteers are free to determine their participation levels, we can expect a crowding in effect, such that extrinsic motivation (and specifically, reputation motives) would bolster intrinsic motivation. Formally stated:

Hypothesis 5: Higher level of reputation motivation will be associated with increased level of intrinsic motivation.