Blog

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

After the Bot Scare: Understanding What's Been Happening With Data Collection on MTurk and How to Stop It
Aaron Moss, PhD

After the Bot Scare: Understanding What's Been Happening With Data Collection on MTurk and How to Stop It

In this blog, we review recent concerns about bots, along with general data quality issues, on Mechanical Turk and report the results of a study we conducted to investigate the problem.

Read More >
CloudResearch Tools to Help Combat Responses from Suspicious Geolocations
Aaron Moss, PhD

CloudResearch Tools to Help Combat Responses from Suspicious Geolocations

Last week, the research community was struck with concern that “bots” were contaminating data collection on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk). We wrote about the issue and conducted our own preliminary investigation into the problem using the CloudResearch database. In this blog, we introduce two new tools CloudResearch is launching to help researchers combat suspicious activity on MTurk and reiterate some of the important takeaways from this conversation so far.

Read More >
Concerns About Bots on Mechanical Turk: Problems and Solutions
Aaron Moss, PhD

Concerns About Bots on Mechanical Turk: Problems and Solutions

When researchers collect data online, it's natural to be concerned about data quality. Participants aren't in the lab, so researchers can't see who is taking their survey, what those participants are doing while answering questions, or whether participants are who they say they are. Not knowing is unsettling.

Read More >
MicroBatch Is Now a Pro Feature
Leib Litman, PhD

MicroBatch Is Now a Pro Feature

CloudResearch is announcing a change in our pricing for the MicroBatch feature. MicroBatch is now included as a Pro feature, with a fee of 2 cents + 5% per complete. This will also provide users with access to all other...

Read More >
Conducting Research: How Online Research Tools Can Help
Leib Litman, PhD

Conducting Research: How Online Research Tools Can Help

When researchers learn about conducting research online, it can sometimes be difficult to understand quite how all the tools that are available can actually be applied to a project. This post is about how specific research ideas can be carried...

Read More >
New Feature: Exclude Highly Active Workers
Leib Litman, PhD

New Feature: Exclude Highly Active Workers

Some workers on MTurk are extremely active, and take the majority of posted HITs. This can lead to many issues, some of which are outlined in our previous post. Although MTurk has over 100,000 workers who take surveys each year,...

Read More >
Best Recruitment Practices: Working With Issues of Non-Naivete on MTurk
Leib Litman, PhD

Best Recruitment Practices: Working With Issues of Non-Naivete on MTurk

It is important to consider how many highly experienced workers there are on Mechanical Turk. As discussed in previous posts, there is a population pool of active workers in the thousands, but this is far from exhaustible. A small group...

Read More >
Are MTurk Workers Who They Say They Are?
Leib Litman, PhD

Are MTurk Workers Who They Say They Are?

The internet has the reputation of being a place where people can hide in anonymity, and present as being very different people than who they actually are. Is this a problem on Mechanical Turk? Is the self-reported information provided by...

Read More >
Strengths and Limitations of Mechanical Turk
Leib Litman, PhD

Strengths and Limitations of Mechanical Turk

Hundreds of academic papers are published each year using data collected through Mechanical Turk. Researchers have gravitated to Mechanical Turk primarily because it provides high quality data quickly and affordably. However, Mechanical Turk has strengths and weaknesses as a platform...

Read More >
Select MTurk Workers by Big Five Personality Types
Jonathan Robinson, PhD

Select MTurk Workers by Big Five Personality Types

Run Studies Targeting Specific Big Five Personality Types CloudResearch introduces a new Big Five personality types qualification: Now social science researchers can run studies targeted to the Big Five: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness, and Neuroticism. Each personality type can be specified...

Read More >

SUBSCRIBE TO RECEIVE UPDATES

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.