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@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Robinson,Cory Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2014 4:40 PM To: air-l@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@colostate.edu<mailto:cory.robinson@colostate.edu> Office: Clark C258A http://colostate.academia.edu/StephenCoryRobinson _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/