Crowdsourced Adaptive Surveys

Public opinion surveys are vital for informing democratic decision-making, but responding to rapidly evolving information environments and measuring beliefs within niche communities can be challenging for traditional survey methods. This paper introduces a crowdsourced adaptive survey methodology (CSAS) that unites advances in natural language processing and adaptive algorithms to generate question banks that evolve with user input. The CSAS method converts open-ended text provided by participants into survey items and applies a multi-armed bandit algorithm to determine which questions should be prioritized in the survey. The method's adaptive nature allows for the exploration of new survey questions, while imposing minimal costs in survey length. Applications in the domains of Latino information environments, national issue importance, and local politics showcase CSAS's ability to identify topics that might otherwise escape the notice of survey researchers. I conclude by highlighting CSAS's potential to bridge conceptual gaps between researchers and participants in survey research.