CloudResearch Blog

One feature of Mechanical Turk is the ability of researchers to give workers bonus payments. Bonuses may be issued for various reasons such as exemplary performance on a task, answering extra questions in a study, or as a reward for completing all the waves in a longitudinal study. In this blog, we describe the various ways you can use TurkPrime to grant MTurk workers a bonus.

Topics: amazon mechanical turk, turkprime, TurkPrime Features, mturk workers, worker bonus

Last month, we published a blog titled, “Five Things you Should Not be Doing in Online Data Collection.” Among the things we identified that you should not be doing was launching your study without piloting it first. As a way to reiterate how important we think this issue is, we describe in this blog how to easily conduct a pilot study using TurkPrime.

Topics: turkprime, mturk toolkit, TurkPrime Features, research best practices, market research, research solutions

Academic research is a collaborative endeavor. Faculty members work with post-docs, grad students, and undergrads. Sometimes one lab collaborates with another. During the course of such work, resources sometimes need to be shared or redistributed. At TurkPrime, we have sought to make part of this sharing easier by allowing researchers to transfer funds from one user’s lab balance to another. In this blog, we demonstrate how to use this feature.

Topics: amazon mechanical turk, online research, mturk toolkit, TurkPrime Features, transfer funds

One reason Amazon Mechanical Turk has become so popular among researchers is the speed with which data can be collected. Compared to more traditional research methods—lab-based experiments, field studies, ethnographic interviews, etc—MTurk is exceptionally fast, making it possible to collect data for an entire study within a day or sometimes just a few hours. Although MTurk’s speed is nice, there are times when collecting data all at once can actually be a problem. In this blog, we explain how to spread your data collection out across time and why you might want to do so.

Topics: amazon mechanical turk, mturk toolkit, TurkPrime Features, MTurk solutions, MircoBatch, best practices for online research

In this blog, we highlight some subtle and not so subtle aspects of the TurkPrime Dashboard you can use to make navigation and completing study-related tasks easier. 

Topics: turkprime, mturk toolkit, TurkPrime Features, academic research, market research

What is a Survey Group?

Survey Groups are one of the most powerful and dynamic tools on TurkPrime for controlling which workers are eligible and ineligible for your study. A Survey Group is exactly what it sounds like: a collection of surveys or studies you have grouped together. Survey Groups are useful when you want to ensure your studies have unique workers. This may be a set of studies investigating the same topic or multiple studies being run in your lab at the same time for which you want no overlap in participants.

Topics: turkprime, mturk toolkit, TurkPrime Features

In this blog, we explain everything you could ever want to know about including and excluding participants from studies while using TurkPrime. In last week’s blog on longitudinal studies, we described our Include Workers feature, but this blog digs into the nitty-gritty and explains what our features are, when you might want to use them, and how they work.

Topics: exclude workers, include workers, prime panels, mturk toolkit, TurkPrime Features