Blog

Read our latest articles for tips, tricks, advice and news about research techniques and solutions.

Including and Excluding Participants From Studies Run Through CloudResearch: What, When and How
Richa Gautam

Including and Excluding Participants From Studies Run Through CloudResearch: What, When and How

In this blog, we explain everything you could ever want to know about including and excluding participants from studies while using CloudResearch. In last week's blog on longitudinal studies, we described our Include Workers feature, but this blog digs into the nitty-gritty and explains what our features are, when you might want to use them, and how they work.

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Running Longitudinal Studies on CloudResearch
Sam Krumholtz

Running Longitudinal Studies on CloudResearch

In this blog, we describe how to run a longitudinal study on MTurk, using CloudResearch. We also provide tips for maximizing worker participation and minimizing attrition.

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Understanding Geolocations and Their Connection to Data Quality
Richa Gautam

Understanding Geolocations and Their Connection to Data Quality

In this blog, we outline the history of our Block Duplicate Geolocations tool, provide an overview of what geolocations are and the information they convey, and present the results of a study that examined the quality of data obtained from repeated geolocations that are not linked to server farms. We conclude by outlining the steps we are taking to change the default options on our Block Duplicate Geolocations feature.

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How to Gather Demographically-Representative Samples in Online Studies
Aaron Moss, PhD

How to Gather Demographically-Representative Samples in Online Studies

Most social science research relies on convenience sampling of participants, meaning few samples look like let alone represent the general population. For many research questions, convenience samples are not a problem. Yet, for other questions, being able to capture and represent the opinions of people from different groups is essential. Because most researchers do not routinely gather these kinds of samples, knowing where to find one when it's needed can be difficult.

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Recruiting Older Adults Online
Richa Gautam

Recruiting Older Adults Online

People of different ages vary greatly in their beliefs and behaviors. For example, a recent Pew report outlines wide generational gaps in people's opinions on several political issues like presidential job approval, perceptions of racism, views on immigration, and political ideology (Pew Research Center, 2018). Furthermore, some issues, like the use of Medicare, depend on age and therefore are more relevant to older adults than younger ones.

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Creating Compensation HITs for Mechanical Turk Workers
Aaron Moss, PhD

Creating Compensation HITs for Mechanical Turk Workers

At CloudResearch, we advocate for requesters to treat workers fairly when posting HITs on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Workers are, after all, the people who make the research possible. Sometimes situations arise in which an MTurk worker is unable to receive payment, despite having completed a survey. Below are two common scenarios in which a worker may not be paid, despite completing a survey:

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Running Dyadic Studies on Mechanical Turk Using CloudResearch
Sam Krumholtz

Running Dyadic Studies on Mechanical Turk Using CloudResearch

Studying pairs of people (e.g., married couples, friends, coworkers, etc) is becoming increasingly common in the social and behavioral sciences. Online participant populations, such as Mechanical Turk and other online panels, can potentially serve as a rich source of dyadic...

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Moving Beyond Bots: MTurk as a Source of High Quality Data
Leib Litman, PhD

Moving Beyond Bots: MTurk as a Source of High Quality Data

About a month ago, we published After the Bot Scare blog on workers providing bad quality data on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. This month, we followed up with our “farmers” to assess the effectiveness of the tools we created to deal with the problem. In this blog, we present data from our follow-up study and evidence to suggest our tools are working.

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How to Obtain an Online National Sample Stratified by Wealth
Aaron Moss, PhD

How to Obtain an Online National Sample Stratified by Wealth

A Case Study From a Recent JESP Article A new study appearing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests Americans strongly believe in economic mobility because they fail to appreciate how vast wealth inequality really is. In this blog,...

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The Universal Exclude List: A Tool for Blocking Bad Workers
Aaron Moss, PhD

The Universal Exclude List: A Tool for Blocking Bad Workers

By now, even casual users of MTurk have heard about recent concerns of “bots” or low quality data. We've written about the topic here and laid out evidence that suggests “bots” are actually foreign workers using tools to obscure their true location (here). Perhaps most importantly, we've created two tools to help keep these workers out of your studies. In this blog, we introduce a third tool: the Universal Exclude List.

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