Problem: Suppose you need to run a HIT with 1000 Workers. Or a HIT that is only open to Workers who have an approval Rating of 95% or more and have completed 500 HITs or more. Although when you launched...
Problem: Suppose you need to run a group of HITs open only to participants who are women under 50. You previously ran a HIT and know the Worker IDs that you want to reach, but have no way to email...
An IRB will generally request a description of how participants will be recruited, reimbursed and interacted with. Additionally IRBs always request information about how anonymity of the participants is protected. Members of the IRB board may not be familiar with Amazon Turk, and it may be helpful to include a brief description of MTurk in your IRB application.
In this blog, we report on the demographics of Mechanical Turk workers by reviewing 75 studies conducted with US-based Workers in 2013 and 2014. From a total of 32,595 Workers, we found 15,324 were female (47%).
We describe a general formula for predicting the time it takes Workers to complete survey studies on MTurk. The average Worker takes 10.3 seconds to answer a single question. This means that a study with 60 questions should take approximately 10 minutes.
It is generally thought that pay rate does not affect data quality on Mechanical Turk. For example (Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2011) showed that whether Workers are paid 5 cents or one dollar for a survey study, the internal reliability of the surveys does not change. They did show however that fewer Workers will take the surveys that pay less. We recently replicated these findings for both US and India-based Workers (Litman et al, 2014).
