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@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@colostate.edu<mailto:cory.robinson@colostate.edu> Office: Clark C258A http://colostate.academia.edu/StephenCoryRobinson
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