Last week, the research community was struck with concern that “bots” were contaminating data collection on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). We wrote about the issue and conducted our own preliminary investigation into the problem using the TurkPrime database. In this blog, we introduce two new tools TurkPrime is launching to help researchers combat suspicious activity on MTurk and reiterate some of the important takeaways from this conversation so far.
TurkPrime Tools to Help Combat Responses from Suspicious Geolocations
Posted by
Jonathan Robinson on Aug 15, 2018 2:51:00 PM
1 Comment Click here to read/write comments
Topics: amazon mechanical turk, bots, mechanical turk, mturk, workers
Concerns about Bots on Mechanical Turk: Problems and Solutions
Posted by
Leib Litman on Aug 10, 2018 6:46:00 PM
Data quality on online platforms
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.
0 Comments Click here to read/write comments
Topics: bots, mechanical turk, mturk, quality, turkprime, workers
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.
1 Comment Click here to read/write comments
Topics: active workers, amazon mechanical turk, exclude, exclude workers, HIT, mechanical turk, mturk, online research, turkprime, workers, active
Best recruitment practices: working with issues of non-naivete on MTurk
Posted by
Leib Litman on Dec 8, 2017 3:59:00 PM
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).
0 Comments Click here to read/write comments
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.
0 Comments Click here to read/write comments
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.
0 Comments Click here to read/write comments
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
Finding More Mechanical Turk Workers Faster with TurkPrime "Restart HIT"
Posted by
Jonathan Robinson on Mar 24, 2015 2:47:00 PM
Problem:
Suppose you need to run a HIT with 1000 Workers. Or a HIT that is only open to Workers who have an approval Rating of 95% or more and have completed 500 HITs or more. Although when you launched your HIT the MTurk Workers arrived at a nice pace, over time, the pace has slowed to a trickle such that your HIT will never complete.
0 Comments Click here to read/write comments
Topics: amazon mechanical turk, bump, HIT, increase participation, mechanical turk, restart, speed, workers