Crowdsourcing awareness: exploration of the ovarian cancer knowledge gap through Amazon Mechanical Turk.
BACKGROUND
Ovarian cancer is the most lethal gynecologic disease in the United States, with more women dying from this cancer than all gynecological cancers combined. Ovarian cancer has been termed the "silent killer" because some patients do not show clear symptoms at an early stage. Currently, there is a lack of approved and effective early diagnostic tools for ovarian cancer. There is also an apparent severe knowledge gap of ovarian cancer in general and of its indicative symptoms among both public and many health professionals. These factors have significantly contributed to the late stage diagnosis of most ovarian cancer patients (63% are diagnosed at Stage III or above), where the 5-year survival rate is less than 30%. The paucity of knowledge concerning ovarian cancer in the United States is unknown.


METHODS
The present investigation examined current public awareness and knowledge about ovarian cancer. The study implemented design strategies to develop an unbiased survey with quality control measures, including the modern application of multiple statistical analyses. The survey assessed a reasonable proxy of the US population by crowdsourcing participants through the online task marketplace Amazon Mechanical Turk, at a highly condensed rate of cost and time compared to traditional recruitment methods.


CONCLUSIONS
Knowledge of ovarian cancer was compared to that of breast cancer using repeated measures, bias control and other quality control measures in the survey design. Analyses included multinomial logistic regression and categorical data analysis procedures such as correspondence analysis, among other statistics. We confirmed the relatively poor public knowledge of ovarian cancer among the US population. The simple, yet novel design should set an example for designing surveys to obtain quality data via Amazon Mechanical Turk with the associated analyses.
Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, United States of America.
Rebecca R
RR
Carter
Case Comprehensive Cancer Center, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, United States of America.
Analisa
A
DiFeo
Departments of Orthopaedics and Biomedical Engineering, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, United States of America.
Kath
K
Bogie
Case Comprehensive Cancer Center, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, United States of America.
Guo-Qiang
GQ
Zhang
Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, United States of America.
Jiayang
J
Sun
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D063045:Crowdsourcing / Q000379:methods*; D042241:Early Diagnosis; D005260:Female; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006306:Health Surveys / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010051:Ovarian Neoplasms / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology; D015995:Prevalence; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D014481:United States / Q000453:epidemiology; D055815:Young Adult