Design and development of a DSS supporting the integration of crowdsourcing in theory testing: A design science perspective

The integration of crowdsourcing in behavioral research in the IS field offers several advantages and opportunities. This paper builds on prior study, employing a design science research (DSR) paradigm to design, develop and evaluate a tool that assists researchers in adopting crowdsourcing when testing theory about behavioral phenomena. The proposed tool is based on an extensive review of literature on how theory has been tested, and a pattern model that standardizes extracted concepts, activities, processes and relationships into patterns. In particular, we discuss the architecture of the proposed tool and present two prototypes, one used for knowledge articulation by representing, extracting, organizing and acting on relevant information and the other on decision making and recommendation for the tool users. Evaluation results show the applicability and utility of the tool.