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.
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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.
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New Feature: Select MTurk Workers by Big Five Personality Types
Run Studies Targeting Specific Big Five Personality Types
TurkPrime introduces a new Big Five personality types qualification: Now social science researchers can run studies targeted to the Big Five:
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Studies with Panels for just $0.15 - 0.75 / complete
Now you can run Mechanical Turk studies using your own Requester account and specify over two dozen demographic traits!. The traits include gender, ethnicity, age, marital status and sexual orientation. But it does not stop there! The available options also include occupation, medical and health history, cell phone use and much more.
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MTurk Requesters are often interested in studying specific groups of people. For example, a researcher may be interested in men over 40, Republicans, people who are concerned about the cleanliness of sponges, or cancer survivors. TurkPrime Panels utilizes various techniques that make the process of acquiring specific MTurk samples faster and cheaper. We virtually guarantee to be able to get panels more economically than most Requesters are able to do on their own. Additionally, we can get the panels a lot faster, and eliminate the considerable amount of manual work that is required to obtain panels.
Topics: amazon mechanical turk, demographics, mechanical turk, requester, turkprime panels