When you link an Amazon Mechanical Turk account to CloudResearch, you can run studies on Mechanical Turk while using CloudResearch features meant to simplify setting up and managing studies. In order for CloudResearch to communicate with MTurk, you must create an Amazon Web Services account and give CloudResearch permission to interact with your Amazon account. If you have been through this process, you may remember creating an “Identity Access Management” (IAM) user and entering the secret key and secret access keys generated for this user into CloudResearch.
In a recent research article, we reported that there are 250,810 MTurk workers worldwide who have completed at least one Human Intelligence Task (HIT) posted through the TurkPrime platform. More than 226,500 of these workers are based in the US.
One feature of Mechanical Turk is the ability of researchers to give workers bonus payments. Bonuses may be issued for various reasons such as exemplary performance on a task, answering extra questions in a study, or as a reward for...
By now, most people have heard of the gig economy and have some idea of how it works. In the gig economy, people perform short-term jobs or tasks to earn money. Gig economy jobs are considered independent or contract work, meaning people who work in the gig economy often trade the benefits and stability of traditional employment for the freedom and flexibility to decide when and how much they work.
A persistent cause of concern for researchers who conduct studies online is understanding what participants might be doing while completing their study. When participants are outside the lab, they cannot be observed and distracting aspects of the environment cannot be controlled by the research team. As a result, researchers are left to wonder: how much attention are participants giving my survey?
Last month, we published a blog titled, “Five Things You Should Not Be Doing in Online Data Collection.” Among the things we identified that you should not be doing was launching your study without piloting it first. As a way...
