[Air-L] Soliciting opinions about using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (aka Mturk) for survey participant recruitment

[Aaron S. Veenstra]

If you're doing experiments, MTurk is great, especially if your likely
alternative is a sample of undergrads. If you're doing surveys, it's
not. The U.S. users are not representative of the American population,
and I'd imagine the same is true of other countries' MTurk
populations. And even if it were, there's no way to prove that to any
kind of satisfaction. Basically, using it for a survey that you want
to generalize to the population isn't getting you a sample that's any
better than posting the survey to Facebook and Twitter and asking
people to spread it around.

FWIW, the skew I've seen with MTurk samples compared to the U.S.
population is a) slightly too male, b) slightly too white, c) too
young (though older and with more age variance than an undergrad
sample), d) average income too low, and e) too liberal (though, again,
less skew than I'd expect from undergrads).

Aaron

On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 6:40 PM, Robinson,Cory
<cory.Robinson at colostate.edu> wrote:
> While Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey seem to be generally well respected, they also come with hefty price tags for participant recruitment ($5-10 per American respondent). Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (aka Mturk), on the other hand, can recruit participants for far less (<$1/respondent).
>
> What is the AoIR consensus on utilizing Mturk? I’ve seen articles both for and against using the service.
>
> Thanks in advance for all opinions/insights.
>
> - Cory Robinson
> --
> Stephen Cory Robinson
> cory.robinson at colostate.edu<mailto:cory.robinson at colostate.edu>
> Office: Clark C258A
> http://colostate.academia.edu/StephenCoryRobinson
>
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-- 
Aaron S. Veenstra
Assistant Professor, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
School of Journalism || 1232 Comm Building
asveenstra at siu.edu || manytoomany.com