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

Ashley Nicoles Sanders-Jackson asnsande at stanford.edu
Wed Jan 8 16:49:42 PST 2014


Hi Cory,

Part of it depends on the type of data you are collecting. What is your
research question?  Do you need follow-up? How important is it that you
have some way to verify that people are who they claim to be or in the
location in they claim to be?

I've been given to understand that the population that mechanical comes
from tends to be younger and tends to have a lower income (please correct
me if I am wrong).  Is this a population you are interested in
generalizing from?

Another issue is data protection.  I work in a medical school. We are very
concerned with HIPAA and how we store data.  Though I might be able to use
Mturk for some purposes, I wouldn't ask about many health-related
behaviors.  However, we are seriously considering using Mturk to do some
very preliminary pretesting on a couple of health-related messages geared
toward young adults (this will be followed by other, more in-depth
experiments).

This probably doesn't help at all but at least if you clarify your
research questions other people who know more can give you better help.

Ashley
-----Original Message-----
From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org
[mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Robinson,Cory
Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2014 4:40 PM
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Subject: [Air-L] Soliciting opinions about using Amazon's Mechanical Turk
(aka Mturk) for survey participant recruitment

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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