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Inside the Turk

Current Directions in Psychological SciencePublished 1 June 2014
Gabriele Paolacci, Jesse Chandler
Citations2,173
SJR quartileQ1
SJR score3.21
SNIP3.16

Abstract

Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online labor market created by Amazon, has recently become popular among social scientists as a source of survey and experimental data. The workers who populate this market have been assessed on dimensions that are universally relevant to understanding whether, why, and when they should be recruited as research participants. We discuss the characteristics of MTurk as a participant pool for psychology and other social sciences, highlighting the traits of the MTurk samples, why people become MTurk workers and research participants, and how data quality on MTurk compares to that from other pools and depends on controllable and uncontrollable factors.

Keywords

Computer Science