When researchers collect data online, it’s natural to be concerned about data quality. Participants aren’t in the lab, so researchers can’t see who is taking their survey, what those participants are doing while answering questions, or whether participants are who they say they are. Not knowing is unsettling.
Topics: bots, mechanical turk, mturk, quality, turkprime, workers
TurkPrime is announcing a change in our pricing for the MicroBatch feature. MicroBatch is now included as a Pro feature, with a fee of 2 cents + 5% per complete. This will also provide users with access to all other pro features, with no additional charge. This change is necessary so that we can continue to provide the highest quality service and tools that our users expect.
Topics: amazon mechanical turk, microbatch, mturk, online research, pro features
When researchers learn about conducting research online, it can sometimes be difficult to understand quite how all the tools that are available can actually be applied to a project. This post is about how specific research ideas can be carried out using the kinds of features available for online research. Online research tools can make it much simpler to recruit balanced samples of individuals that are hard to find and selectively sample using more traditional methods.
Topics: Uncategorized
Some workers on MTurk are extremely active, and take the majority of posted HITs. This can lead to many issues, some of which are outlined in our previous post. Although MTurk has over 100,000 workers who take surveys each year, and around 25,000 who take surveys each month, you are much more likely to recruit highly active workers who take a majority of HITs. About 1,000 workers (1% of workers) take 21% of the HITs. About 10,000 workers (10% of workers) take 74% of all HITs.
Topics: active workers, amazon mechanical turk, exclude, exclude workers, HIT, mechanical turk, mturk, online research, turkprime, workers, active
It is important to consider how many highly experienced workers there are on Mechanical Turk. As discussed in previous posts, there is a population pool of active workers in the thousands, but this is far from exhaustible. A small group of workers take a very large number of HITs posted to MTurk, and these workers are very experienced and have seen measures commonly used in the social and behavioral sciences. Research has shown that when participants are repeatedly exposed to the same measures, this can have negative effects on data collection, changing the way workers perform, creating treatment effects, giving participants insight into the purpose of some studies, and in some cases impact effect sizes of experimental manipulations. This issue is referred to as non-naivete (Chandler, 2014; Chandler, 2016).
Topics: amazon mechanical turk, approval rating, experience, exposure, HIT, mechanical turk, mturk, naivete, non-naive, primepanels, qualification, recruitment, requester, workers
The internet has the reputation of being a place where people can hide in anonymity, and present as being very different people than who they actually are. Is this a problem on Mechanical Turk? Is the self-reported information provided by Mechanical Turk workers reliable? These are important questions which have been addressed with several different methods. Researchers have examined a) consistency of responding to the same questions over time and across studies b) the validity of responses, or the degree to which the items capture responses that represent the truth from participants. It turns out that there are certain situations in which MTurk workers are likely to lie, but they are who they say they are in almost all cases.
Topics: amazon mechanical turk, anonymous, demographics, HIT, mturk, panels, qualification, turkprime panels, unique worker, worker groups, workers
Hundreds of academic papers are published each year using data collected through Mechanical Turk. Researchers have gravitated to Mechanical Turk primarily because it provides high quality data quickly and affordably. However, Mechanical Turk has strengths and weaknesses as a platform for data collection. While Mechanical Turk has revolutionized data collection, it is by no means a perfect platform. Some of the major strengths and limitations of MTurk are summarized below.
Topics: amazon mechanical turk, demographics, exclude workers, google form mechanical turk, HIT, mechanical turk, mturk, mturk api, panels, qualification, study, turkprime panels, unique worker, worker groups, workers
Please join us this Friday, May 21st at 1pm at our APS symposium in New York City. We will be presenting talks on TurkPrime and how to make the most of Mechanical Turk.
Topics: amazon mechanical turk, APS, mturk
An IRB will generally request a description of how participants will be recruited, reimbursed and interacted with. Additionally IRBs always request information about how anonymity of the participants is protected. Members of the IRB board may not be familiar with Amazon Turk, and it may be helpful to include a brief description of MTurk in your IRB application. Note that many MTurk studies will be exempt from review, provided that the nature of MTurk is explained clearly enough, and the anonymity of the data collection process is made clear.
Topics: amazon mechanical turk, IRB, mechanical turk
We describe a general formula for predicting the time it takes Workers to complete survey studies on MTurk. The average Worker takes 10.3 seconds to answer a single question. This means that a study with 60 questions should take approximately 10 minutes. At $6 per hour the appropriate pay rate for a 60 question survey would be $1.
Topics: amazon mechanical turk, completion rate, mechanical turk