Online panels in social science research: Expanding sampling methods beyond Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is widely used by behavioral scientists to recruit research participants. MTurk offers advantages over traditional student subject pools, but it also has important limitations. In particular, the MTurk population is small and potentially overused, and some groups of in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Behavior research methods Vol. 51; no. 5; pp. 2022 - 2038
Main Authors: Chandler, Jesse, Rosenzweig, Cheskie, Moss, Aaron J., Robinson, Jonathan, Litman, Leib
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York Springer US 01.10.2019
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Attention
Attitudes
Behavioral Research - methods
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Cognitive Psychology
Crowdsourcing
Data Accuracy
Data quality
Families & family life
Humans
Internet
Mass Screening
Political attitudes
Psychology
Reliability
Religiosity
Reproducibility of Results
Sampling
Social research
Social Sciences
Social scientists
Students
Data collection
Prime panels
Mechanical Turk
Online experimentation
ISSN:1554-3528, 1554-351X, 1554-3528
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is widely used by behavioral scientists to recruit research participants. MTurk offers advantages over traditional student subject pools, but it also has important limitations. In particular, the MTurk population is small and potentially overused, and some groups of interest to behavioral scientists are underrepresented and difficult to recruit. Here we examined whether online research panels can avoid these limitations. Specifically, we compared sample composition, data quality (measured by effect sizes, internal reliability, and attention checks), and the non-naivete of participants recruited from MTurk and Prime Panels—an aggregate of online research panels. Prime Panels participants were more diverse in age, family composition, religiosity, education, and political attitudes. Prime Panels participants also reported less exposure to classic protocols and produced larger effect sizes, but only after screening out several participants who failed a screening task. We conclude that online research panels offer a unique opportunity for research, yet one with some important trade-offs.
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ISSN:1554-3528
1554-351X
1554-3528
DOI:10.3758/s13428-019-01273-7