CloudResearch Blog

Overview

An IRB will generally request a description of how participants will be recruited, reimbursed and interacted with. Additionally IRBs always request information about how anonymity of the participants is protected. Members of the IRB board may not be familiar with Amazon Turk, and it may be helpful to include a brief description of MTurk in your IRB application. Note that many MTurk studies will be exempt from review, provided that the nature of MTurk is explained clearly enough, and the anonymity of the data collection process is made clear.

Overview

In this blog, we report on the demographics of Mechanical Turk workers by reviewing 75 studies conducted with US-based Workers in 2013 and 2014. From a total of 32,595 Workers, we found 15,324 were female (47%).

Background

It’s been a while since the last update on the demographics of Mechanical Turk Workers, so we thought it’s time for a new look. The current consensus seems to be that MTurk Workers are primarily female. For example, Panos Ipeirotis' blog reports that US-based Workers are 65% female. MTurk is always changing, though, so this report presents data from 75 studies conducted over the last two years.

Overview

The simple formula

We describe a general formula for predicting the time it takes Workers to complete survey studies on MTurk. The average Worker takes 10.3 seconds to answer a single question. This means that a study with 60 questions should take approximately 10 minutes. At $6 per hour the appropriate pay rate for a 60 question survey would be $1.

Brief overview

It is generally thought that pay rate does not affect data quality on Mechanical Turk. For example (Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2011) showed that whether Workers are paid 5 cents or one dollar for a survey study, the internal reliability of the surveys does not change. They did show however that fewer Workers will take the surveys that pay less. We recently replicated these findings for both US and India-based Workers (Litman et al, 2014). Here we show that low pay rates have two effects on Workers: 1) Workers are more likely to return a HIT before completing it and 2) Workers spend less time answering questions. We examined 30 MTurk studies that were run over the last 6 months. The findings show that 36% of the dropout rate variance is explained by the length and pay rate of a survey. These results show that low pay rates do more than just slow down the rate at which Workers take HITs. Low pay rates may also negatively impact the representativeness of data due to high participant dropout, and they may also decrease how much attention participants pay to each question. Based on these findings we recommend against low paying HIT We also recommend against overly long surveys, unless Workers are appropriately compensated. To minimize dropout and to maximize time on task, compensation for HITs should not be below $4 per hour and should be closer to $6 per hour or more.

What is the completion rate and dropout rate?

Dropout rate is defined as the percentage of participants who start taking a study but do not complete it. Dropout rate is sometimes referred to as attrition rate, and is the opposite of completion rate (dropout rate = 100 – completion rate). On MTurk, completion rate is defined as the number of Workers who submit a HIT divided by the number of Workers who accept the HIT. Note that, for the definition of completion rate used here, Rejected Workers are counted as completes.

MTurk Requesters are often interested in studying specific groups of people. For example, a researcher may be interested in men over 40, Republicans, people who are concerned about the cleanliness of sponges, or cancer survivors. TurkPrime Panels utilizes various techniques that make the process of acquiring specific MTurk samples faster and cheaper. We virtually guarantee to be able to get panels more economically than most Requesters are able to do on their own. Additionally, we can get the panels a lot faster, and eliminate the considerable amount of manual work that is required to obtain panels.