Lab 5: Crowdsourcing
- ashleyabduok
- Dec 1, 2021
- 3 min read
Are Individuals in Our Community Educated on Climate Change?
For this lab we wanted to crowdsource by using surveys and look at a topic that is not only important, but we plan to utilize findings from this in our multimedia final project as well. For this we asked three general questions about climate change.
1. Do you know what climate change is?
a. Yes
b. No
c. Maybe
2. Are you affected by climate change?
a. Yes
b. No
c. Maybe
3. Do you think climate change and its effect on wildlife is a crisis?
a. Yes
b. No
c. Maybe
The general idea of our story would focus on our community and not only if they are affected by climate change, but if they are educated on the topic to at least know what it means, and whether or not they think it is a major crisis when it comes to wildlife.
While doing some research, we found an article that specifically talks about Climate Crowd – a global online crowdsourcing tool that allows anyone who are working in remote areas to collect and share data on how people are adapting to or coping with climate change. Ultimately their goal is to use their data to find solutions that help people and ecosystems adapt to climate change without harming nature. Another article talks about crowdsourcing solutions to climate change . Ultimately, it is about making a difference and educating people, which would be the general idea of our story.
Our Data - Crowdsourcing Using Twitter

We then moved to the crowd sourcing portion of our research. We created a Google Form to collect and organize data. During these times of social distancing, we found it easier to reach people for our crowdsourcing measures virtually. We each posted on our social media accounts asking people to participate in the study. In addition to that, we personally sent our form to friends, families, coworkers, etc.
When conducting the crowd-sourcing and tailoring our questions, we made sure to follow this set of guidelines:
Be specific
Be brief. Lots of questions or questions loaded with words would risk people getting restless and either not finishing or begin to answer questions without thinking just to get finished.
Create crowd diversity. For this reason, we sought answers from everywhere. Since we all know different sets of people, this was a good way to reach a diverse crowd to ensure we were not receiving one-sided answers or answers biased by just one set of demographics.
We received 53 responses and of those responses, we found that 88.5% of these people were aware of what climate change is, while 11.5% answered “maybe.” When asked, “Are you affected by climate change?” 53.8% answered “yes,” while 17.3% reported not being affected by climate change and 28.8% categorized themselves as “maybe” being affected by climate change. Our last question was, “Do you think climate change and its effects on wildlife is a crisis?” 88.5% believed this to be true while 5.8% answered “no” and 5.8% answered “maybe.” As our last step, we organized our findings into infographics.
Conclusion
We were not surprised to see the general consensus on the issue was yes - people do know what climate change is - but were not quite sure if they personally have been affected by it in some way. Using Twitter seemed to very effective, because we created a Google Form it was easy for participants to submit their answers and for the data to be accuratley divided. If we were to do anything differently I think we could utilize more than one social media platform to generate even more responses.
Other ways you can get involved: spread awareness on your socials


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