On the adoption of crowdsourcing for theory testing

© 26th European Conference on Information Systems: Beyond Digitization - Facets of Socio-Technical Change, ECIS 2018. All Rights Reserved. This paper examines the possibilities of using the crowdsourcing strategy for theory testing. We first analyse the relationships between theory building and theory testing activities. Then, based on a systematic review of 248 papers published in MISQ, we characterise the intents and pattern systems of activities that have been used for theory testing. Finally, we ascertain which activities can be crowdsourced or not and pinpoint a set of pathways supporting partial and total crowdsourcing. The obtained results show that a large number of activities related to data gathering can be crowdsourced, and that a number of intents have viable pathways supporting partial crowdsourcing.