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MTurk Worker Dynamics: How Many New Workers Join Each Month?

Posted by TurkPrime on Jul 30, 2019 8:15:00 AM

In a recent research article (https://psyarxiv.com/jq589/), we reported on the size of the MTurk worker pool. Using observed participation rates from the TurkPrime database, we found that over each of the last three years there have been approximately eighty to eighty-five thousand US workers active on MTurk each year (Figure 1). What these numbers do not illustrate is how often new workers join the platform—a number that is important for researchers who want to sample naive participants.

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Topics: mturk, turkprime, mturk workers, turkprime research, participant pool

Best Practices for Rotating Amazon Web Services Access Keys for TurkPrime Users

Posted by TurkPrime on Jul 2, 2019 8:24:03 AM

When you link an Amazon Mechanical Turk account to TurkPrime, you can run studies on Mechanical Turk while using TurkPrime features meant to simplify setting up and managing studies. In order for TurkPrime to communicate with MTurk, you must create an Amazon Web Services account and give TurkPrime permission to interact with your Amazon account. If you have been through this process, you may remember creating an “Identity Access Management” (IAM) user and entering the secret key and secret access keys generated for this user into TurkPrime. In this blog, we touch on an aspect of account security related to these access keys. Specifically, we describe how you can easily rotate your secret access keys—similar to changing a password—and why you would want to.

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How Many Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers Are There in 2019?

Posted by TurkPrime on Jun 25, 2019 8:30:00 AM

In a recent research article (https://psyarxiv.com/jq589/), we reported that there are 250,810 MTurk workers worldwide who have completed at least one Human Intelligence Task (HIT) posted through the TurkPrime platform. More than 226,500 of these workers are based in the US.

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How to Award a Bonus to MTurk Workers Using TurkPrime

Posted by TurkPrime on Apr 10, 2019 10:00:00 AM
One feature of Mechanical Turk is the ability of researchers to give workers bonus payments. Bonuses may be issued for various reasons such as exemplary performance on a task, answering extra questions in a study, or as a reward for completing all the waves in a longitudinal study. In this blog, we describe the various ways you can use TurkPrime to grant MTurk workers a bonus.
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Topics: amazon mechanical turk, turkprime, TurkPrime Features, mturk workers, worker bonus

Understanding Turkers: How Do Gig Economy Workers Use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk?

Posted by TurkPrime on Mar 15, 2019 2:36:02 PM

By now, most people have heard of the gig economy and have some idea of how it works. In the gig economy, people perform short-term jobs or tasks to earn money. Gig economy jobs are considered independent or contract work, meaning people who work in the gig economy often trade the benefits and stability of traditional employment for the freedom and flexibility to decide when and how much they work. Some of the most easily identifiable gig economy platforms are Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, and the slightly less mentioned Mechanical Turk or MTurk.

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Topics: amazon mechanical turk, turkprime, market research, MTurk insights, mturk workers

How do most MTurk Workers work?

Posted by TurkPrime on Mar 1, 2019 10:22:47 AM

A persistent cause of concern for researchers who conduct studies online is understanding what participants might be doing while completing their study. When participants are outside the lab, they cannot be observed and distracting aspects of the environment cannot be controlled by the research team. As a result, researchers are left to wonder: how much attention are participants giving my survey?

In this blog, we report on one small aspect of this issue by describing the work style adopted by workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

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Topics: amazon mechanical turk, turkprime, mturk toolkit, market research, MTurk insights

How to Easily Run a Pilot Study on TurkPrime

Posted by TurkPrime on Feb 21, 2019 10:00:00 AM

Last month, we published a blog titled, “Five Things you Should Not be Doing in Online Data Collection.” Among the things we identified that you should not be doing was launching your study without piloting it first. As a way to reiterate how important we think this issue is, we describe in this blog how to easily conduct a pilot study using TurkPrime.

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Topics: turkprime, mturk toolkit, TurkPrime Features, research best practices, market research, research solutions

Transfer Funds from one TurkPrime User to Another

Posted by TurkPrime on Feb 14, 2019 11:10:40 AM

Academic research is a collaborative endeavor. Faculty members work with post-docs, grad students, and undergrads. Sometimes one lab collaborates with another. During the course of such work, resources sometimes need to be shared or redistributed. At TurkPrime, we have sought to make part of this sharing easier by allowing researchers to transfer funds from one user’s lab balance to another. In this blog, we demonstrate how to use this feature.

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Topics: amazon mechanical turk, online research, mturk toolkit, TurkPrime Features, transfer funds

Spread Your Data Collection over Days or Weeks with MicroBatch

Posted by TurkPrime on Feb 7, 2019 4:58:56 PM

One reason Amazon Mechanical Turk has become so popular among researchers is the speed with which data can be collected. Compared to more traditional research methods—lab-based experiments, field studies, ethnographic interviews, etc—MTurk is exceptionally fast, making it possible to collect data for an entire study within a day or sometimes just a few hours. Although MTurk’s speed is nice, there are times when collecting data all at once can actually be a problem. In this blog, we explain how to spread your data collection out across time and why you might want to do so.

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Topics: amazon mechanical turk, mturk toolkit, TurkPrime Features, MTurk solutions, MircoBatch, best practices for online research

Tips for Navigating the TurkPrime Dashboard

Posted by TurkPrime on Jan 31, 2019 3:15:00 PM

In this blog, we highlight some subtle and not so subtle aspects of the TurkPrime Dashboard you can use to make navigation and completing study-related tasks easier. 

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Topics: turkprime, mturk toolkit, TurkPrime Features, academic research, market research

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