Political Analysis· 2012Q1
Evaluating Online Labor Markets for Experimental Research: Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk
- 4,087citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2012year
Short summary
Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) offers a low-cost method for recruiting participants for political science experiments, yielding samples more representative of the U.S. population than typical in-person convenience samples.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- MTurk provides a low-cost and easily deployable interface for experimental subject recruitment.
- MTurk samples are more representative of the U.S. population than typical in-person convenience samples.
- MTurk samples are less representative than national probability samples or internet-based panels.
- The paper proposes a framework for evaluating subject pools, demonstrated by replicating published experiments using MTurk.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
We examine the trade-offs associated with using Amazon.com 's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) interface for subject recruitment. We first describe MTurk and its promise as a vehicle for performing low-cost and easy-to-field experiments. We then assess the internal and external validity of experiments performed using MTurk, employing a framework that can be used to evaluate other subject pools. We first investigate the characteristics of samples drawn from the MTurk population. We show that respondents recruited in this manner are often more representative of the U.S. population than in-person convenience samples—the modal sample in published experimental political science—but less representative than subjects in Internet-based panels or national probability samples. Finally, we replicate important published experimental work using MTurk samples.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Political Analysis, 2012 · DOI ↗
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