Introducing Connect's Besample Integration and What It Means for Cross-Cultural Research

At CloudResearch, we recently partnered with Besample to bring Connect participants directly into the Besample platform. Researchers can now recruit Connect participants in the U.S., UK, Canada, and Australia alongside Besample’s participant pools in 16 countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, all from a single study setup. Here’s why we built it and what it means for your research.

The Problem

Cross-cultural research shouldn’t require juggling platforms

Researchers running large multicultural studies kept running into the same obstacle. They could reach participants across the Global South on Besample, but adding a Western comparison sample meant switching platforms, rebuilding the same study somewhere else, and managing recruitment in two places.

That friction adds up. It slows down cross-cultural comparisons, complicates replications, and makes multi-country designs harder to plan from the start. Besample’s researchers asked for a fix often enough that the Besample team brought it to us.

Researchers collecting data for multicultural studies kept telling us they wanted Western comparison samples without leaving Besample. Bringing together Besample’s global reach with CloudResearch’s trusted reputation for high-quality recruitment makes it far easier to design cross-cultural research from the outset, all through one interface.

The Integration

How Connect and Besample work together

Each platform covers a different part of the world, and together they cover much more of it than either could alone.

Besample

Global reach across 16 countries

A global research platform for behavioral studies across linguistic, cultural, and geographic contexts, with more than 60,000 participants and more than 2,000 researchers served.

ArgentinaBrazilEgyptGhanaIndiaIndonesiaJapanKazakhstanKenyaMexicoNigeriaPakistanPhilippinesSouth AfricaTurkeyUkraine

Connect

Vetted participants in the U.S., UK, Canada, and Australia

A proprietary participant pool continuously vetted with behavioral screening, device fingerprinting, and AI-content detection, not just at sign-up but on every study.

Behavioral screeningDevice fingerprintingAI-content detectionDemographic targetingCensus-matched sampling

With the integration in place, researchers on Besample can:

• Replicate findings across Western and non-Western populations
• Add U.S., UK, Canadian, or Australian comparison samples to an existing study
• Design a global study from the outset and manage all recruitment through one interface

Besample also integrates with the tools researchers already use, including Qualtrics, QuestionPro, Labvanced, Gorilla, REDCap, and SoSci Survey. Its data has supported peer-reviewed work in Nature Communications, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Psychological Science.

Why It Matters

Extending Connect’s quality to more researchers

Connect was built to deliver high-quality data with the speed and scale researchers need, and our APIs make it straightforward for partners to plug in. Working with Besample lets us bring that same standard to researchers doing some of the most globally minded work in the field.

Connect has set the standard for participant data quality in the U.S. and UK, combining quality, speed, and scale with easy API integration. Our partnership with Besample extends that quality further. It gives our participants more opportunities to contribute to meaningful research, and it gives Besample a way to offer its researchers the same high standard in the U.S., UK, Canada, and Australia, alongside the global reach they’ve already built.

Timing

A timely option for researchers leaving MTurk

The integration arrives as researchers continue moving away from Mechanical Turk, and as CloudResearch’s own MTurk Toolkit retires on September 30. For researchers looking for a new home for their studies, Connect and Besample together offer rigorously verified participants and a pool that reaches well beyond the traditionally Western-centric samples online research has relied on.

If you’re transitioning from MTurk, see how to move your research to Connect.

The Bottom Line

What this means for you

If your research spans cultures, you no longer have to choose between global reach and trusted Western samples, or manage them on separate platforms. You can recruit both side by side, with data quality controls built in.

Ready to run your next cross-cultural study?