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2 - Mechanical Turk: A Versatile Tool in the Behavioral Scientist’s Toolkit

from Part I - Quantitative Data Collection Sources

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 December 2024

John E. Edlund
Affiliation:
Rochester Institute of Technology, New York
Austin Lee Nichols
Affiliation:
Central European University, Vienna
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Summary

Building a successful research career often requires being adept at the methods and tools of the time. For social and behavioral scientists today, that means navigating online participant platforms and the tools used to create online studies. In this chapter, we describe how Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) can be leveraged as a source for participant recruitment. We provide a brief history of MTurk’s usage by researchers, describe the challenges researchers have faced with the site, and summarize the status of issues like data quality, sample representativeness, and ethics in online research. Along the way, we provide tips for how researchers can use MTurk to collect high-quality data and to start and advance a research career.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

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