Do you want fast and cheap data? Amazon Mechanical Turk (owned by Amazon.com Inc) is a website for quickly paying people to complete small online tasks like surveys. Easily get 300 participants in a few hours if you pay the right amount. 

The goal of the post (along with the next few) is to give a gentle introduction to Amazon Mechanical Turk and to answer a few of the common questions about the website. I am writing these posts to people with a background in social science who are looking for more ways to recruit participants. 

Let us start by introducing terms and describing what the Amazon Mechanical Turk does.

MTurk Terms

Amazon Mechanical Turk has a few unique terms. The four below are the most important. 

MTurk: A common abbreviation for Amazon Mechanical Turk.

HIT: “HIT” stands for Human Intelligence Task, which is any small online job (such as taking a survey) that pays for completion. Regular, non-academic (i.e. non-research) HITs include tasks language translation, image quality rating, and text transcription. HITs are equivalent to studies or experiments for researchers.

Requester: A requester is anyone who pays for completed HITs. In social science, requesters are researchers. This blog will use the terms requester and researcher interchangeably.

Worker: A worker is a person who receives payment to complete HITs. In social science, workers are paid participants.

Now that we know these four terms, I can explain what MTurk can do for a social science researcher.

How MTurk works

The greatest benefit to using MTurk is that you can seamlessly pay participants for their participation and get data very quickly. Since there are many requesters constantly posting small HITs, workers (who also live in different time zones) complete HITs at all times of the day. MTurk is very flexible, you can request nearly online activity (as long as it accords with MTurk’s terms of service) from having participants answer a survey to having them do a more complicated cognitive task.

After creating a requester account, you can make a HIT. A HIT is “launched” making the task, specifying any rules or restrictions for participation, and funding the account (a credit card works fine).

For self-report survey research, it is easy to “point and click” through options to create a HIT. No programming experience is required; it only takes a few minutes to make a HIT that links to a survey website such as Qualtrics, Google Forms, or Survey Monkey.

For more complicated experiments (like tasks from human factors or cognitive psychology), MTurk has an API for making custom HITs. For example, I created a HIT that had participants rate the quality of randomly sorted images. After each participant rated the quality of the last image, they automatically received payment. Since the API is very flexible, just about any task that can be developed for the web can be made for MTurk.

Want to know more about MTurk?

I am planning to write a few more posts about MTurk. Let me know if there is anything in particular that you would like to learn about the topic!