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

[Tim Muntinga]

Additionally, keep in mind the nature of Mechanical Turk; is there an
incentive for the specific group you are targeting to deliver high quality
entries? With the amounts of projects executed on a weekly basis, problems
of satisficing and routine knowledge of internal tests occur. I find this
for surveys quite an important point to consider.

See for more:
Kapelner, A., & Chandler, D. (2010). Preventing Satisficing in online
surveys.

*----*
Tim
*W: *www.timmuntinga.com



2014/1/9 Aaron S. Veenstra <aaron at etchouse.com>

> 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
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