Conducting Survey Research Using MTurk

Abstract

This chapter presents an introduction to crowdsourcing for survey participant recruitment. It also discusses best practices and ethical considerations for conducting survey research using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Readers will learn the benefits, limitations, and trade-offs of using MTurk as compared to other recruitment services, including SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics. A synthesis of survey design guidelines along with a sample survey are presented to help researchers collect the best quality data. Techniques, including SPSS and R syntax, are provided that demonstrate how users can clean resulting data and identify valid responses for which workers could be paid. An overview and syntax for conducting longitudinal studies is provided as well.