<p><em>I've just started reading up on Mechanical Turk. This is a summary of some of the tips that I've found. Admittedly, most of it applies generally to psychological experiments, and not specifically to longer ones.</em></p>

<p>David Sharek <a href="http://www.playgraph.com/2010/bits/experiments-using-mechanical-turk-part-1" rel="nofollow">discusses his workflow which explicitly includes studies in the 30 minute range</a>. Thus, this post is one of the most relevant for dealing with the issue of longer studies.</p>

<h3>Assorted resources</h3>

<p>Here are some  other assorted resources; see also the references at the bottom.</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.millisecond.com/support/docs/v4/html/howto/interopsurveys.htm" rel="nofollow">Interoperating Inquisit with other tools</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/gideongoldin/TurkGate" rel="nofollow">TurkGate</a> is an open source tool to facilitate the use of Mechanical Turk with external psychology experiments.</li>
<li>Mason and Suri (2012) review the potential benefits, implementation, and ethics of Mechanical Turk. </li>
<li><strong>Michael Buhrmester</strong> has a <a href="http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/gosling/reprints/MTurkhowto.pdf" rel="nofollow">guide for social scientists</a>. He provides an outline of his workflow when running studies. </li>
</ul>

<p>Assorted blogs relevant to Mechanical Turk mentioned by Buhrmester</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com" rel="nofollow">http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com</a>. </li>
<li><a href="http://experimentalturk.wordpress.com" rel="nofollow">http://experimentalturk.wordpress.com</a>.</li>
<li><a href="http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/deneme" rel="nofollow">http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/deneme</a>.</li>
<li><a href="http://blog.crowdflower.com" rel="nofollow">http://blog.crowdflower.com</a>.</li>
</ul>

<h3>Configuring external surveys</h3>

<p>The general model seems to be to have a link to an external site (make sure it opens in a new tab or window) where the survey is delivered and a box for the completion code to be entered. </p>

<p>Buhrmester discusses various completion code systems and  opted for the relatively low tech option of getting participants to make up a 4 or 5 digit number and enter it both into the survey and into the mturk. He then uses time stamp data to verify the original completer.</p>

<h3>Payment</h3>

<p>Mason and Suri state</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>However, recent research on the behavior of workers (Chilton et al.,
  2010) demonstrated that workers had a reservation wage (the least
  amount of pay for which they would do the task) of only \$1.38 per
  hour, with an average effective hourly wage of $4.80 for workers
  (Ipeirotis, 2010a).</p>
</blockquote>

<p>In terms of the relationship between payment and quality of worker they cite studies suggesting that there is an initial positive relationship that levels off at a certain point such that at a certain point additional payment does not improve performance.
Masson and Suri then suggest:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Consequently, it is often advisable to start by paying less than the
  expected reservation wage, and then increasing the wage if the rate of
  completed work is too low.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Similarly wages up to a point should increase the speed of data collection.</p>

<h3>Rejection of hits</h3>

<p>Regarding rejecting hits, Michael has simply accepted all hits. This may be simpler than trying to work out which hits are legitimate. This also made sense given that he was often only paying 10 cents per participant for 10 minute experiments. It also has the benefit of not damaging your reputation.</p>

<h3>Quality assurance</h3>

<p>There are two issues here. Did the participant complete the study at all? And did they complete the study in an appropriate manner (e.g., trying on performance task; reading instructions properly; etc.)?</p>

<p>A general approach is to incorporate additional means to usual for detecting dodgy data.
If it's simple to filter out such participants then they don't corrupt the final dataset.</p>

<p>A few ideas:</p>

<ul>
<li>item level reaction time measures </li>
<li>response patterns to negative and positively worded items</li>
<li>repeat items which should yield identical responses</li>
<li>performance measures</li>
<li>Include very simple true-false questions (e.g., 2+2; Who is the president of the United States); Mason and Suri mention that in 500 responses only six got it wrong and three didn't answer.</li>
</ul>

<p>Buhrmester makes the causal observation that the quality of responses may vary based on the country of responders, so for example limited participation to US participants is one coarse means of filtering for quality.</p>

<h3>Managing reputation as a requester</h3>

<p>Buhrmester mentions accepting all hits both for simplicity and managing reptuation.</p>

<p>Mason and Suri (2012) discuss how reputation is discussed and monitored on external sites.</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Turkopticon is a site that allows workers to rate requesters along four
  axes: communicativity, generosity, fairness, and promptness. Turker
  Nation is an online bulletin board where workers routinely comment on
  requesters and communicate about individual HITs. It is strongly
  encouraged that new requesters “introduce” them- selves to the
  Mechanical Turk community by first posting to Turker Nation before
  putting up HITs.</p>
</blockquote>

<h3>References</h3>

<ul>
<li>Rand, D. G. (2012). The promise of Mechanical Turk: How online labor markets can help theorists run behavioral experiments. Journal of theoretical biology, 299, 172-179.</li>
<li>Buhrmester, M., Kwang, T., &amp; Gosling, S.D. (2011). Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: A New Source of Inexpensive, Yet High-Quality, Data? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(1), 3-5.</li>
<li>Mason, W., &amp; Suri, S. (2012). Conducting behavioral research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Behavior research methods, 44(1), 1-23.</li>
<li>Berinsky, A. J., Huber, G. A., &amp; Lenz, G. S. (2011). Using Mechanical Turk as a subject recruitment tool for experimental research. Submitted for review.</li>
<li>Berinsky, A. J., Huber, G. A., &amp; Lenz, G. S. (2012). Evaluating online labor markets for experimental research: Amazon. com's mechanical turk. Political Analysis, 20(3), 351-368.</li>
</ul>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-05-10T07:06:27.263Z
2013-05-10T07:06:27.263Z
Jeromy Anglim
<p>You may want to take a look at <a href="https://www.surveycomet.com" rel="nofollow">SurveyComet.com</a> and <a href="https://www.TurkPrime.com" rel="nofollow">TurkPrime.com</a>. Both offer a pretty nice set of tools to run externally hosted surveys (like on Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey) and allow you to create follow up surveys, exclude previous workers, have specific demographic Panels and much more.</p>

<p>A long survey can be broken into two parts. Launch part 1 and later part2 as a follow up which will only be open to those who took part 1.</p>

<p>Disclaimer: I am part of the software development team and am currently working on those sites.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-01-14T03:06:05.890Z
A quick look suggests the pricing seems reasonable. I'd be curious to know: (a) what proportion of participants tend to complete longer surveys conscientiously - i.e., not skipping questions or responding randomly; (b) whether you can use external tools that require installation of a plugin - in particular, [Inquisit](http://www.millisecond.com/) is a powerful tool for running online psych experiments, but it does require the user to install a plugin.
Jeromy Anglim
CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-01-14T21:02:35.953Z
A. SurveyComet workers are monitored to ensure a high degree of reliability and internal tests have shown that random submissions are rare (<1%). B. Mechanical Turk does not allow requesters to ask workers to install programs so using inquisit is a violation of Amazon's terms of service
Jonathan
CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-01-30T15:36:30.733Z
@JeromyAnglim  Although you may possibly get around the MTurk Terms of Service requirement by stating that the HIT is only open to Workers who have _previously_ downloaded Inquisit. So the download is not _part_ of the HIT.
Jonathan
CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-01-14T01:26:33.600Z
2015-01-14T01:38:49.647Z
2015-01-14T01:38:49.647Z
Jonathan
<p>I'm interested in using Mechanical Turk as a means of recruiting participants for online psychology studies. I have never used it for any research. However, many of my studies take around 30 minutes to an hour to complete. A typical study might involving answering a set of questionnaires using Inquisit. My impression is that Mechanical Turk works best with short studies (i.e., one to five minutes). </p>

<ul>
<li>Is it possible to use Mechanical Turk for longer studies?</li>
<li>Are there any important tips for effectively using Mechanical Turk for longer studies?</li>
<li>Are there any tutorials or case studies which document successful methods for using Mechanical Turk for longer studies?</li>
<li>Or alternatively are there better systems for recruiting paid participants for longer online studies?</li>
</ul>

<p>In general I appreciate that longer studies would require much more remuneration probably more than just a multiple of the amount of time.
I also imagine that there would be additional issues of quality control.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-05-08T04:09:45.947Z
There are no real restrictions on what you can do for an mturk study; all experiment code can be hosted and run on your own servers.
Jeff
CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-05-08T07:54:41.417Z
What is the main motivation for using mturk (or generally, online workforce)? Is it because you need more participants than you can recruit using conventional methods? Because you want a long study that won't require your participants to come to the lab every day? Some other reason?
Ofri Raviv
CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-05-08T08:03:14.657Z
@ofri I imagine speed of recruitment and cost effectiveness are the two main motivations. For example, If I could get 200 conscientious participants to complete a 30 minute study for US\$5 or US\$10 per participant, and it could all be finalised in a day or so, that would make my life a lot easier. mturk manages payment and it also manages the mapping of free time to tasks.
Jeromy Anglim
CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-05-08T08:09:09.023Z
@jeff It's good that it's possible, but I get the impression that there might be additional issues with longer studies around motivating participants to complete the task in the first place and ensuring that they perform the task conscientiously.
Jeromy Anglim
<methodology><internet><mechanical-turk>
How to use Mechanical Turk for longer studies (i.e., 30 minutes+)?
Jeromy Anglim
# How to use Mechanical Turk for longer studies (i.e., 30 minutes+)?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2013-05-08)

I'm interested in using Mechanical Turk as a means of recruiting participants for online psychology studies. I have never used it for any research. However, many of my studies take around 30 minutes to an hour to complete. A typical study might involving answering a set of questionnaires using Inquisit. My impression is that Mechanical Turk works best with short studies (i.e., one to five minutes).

* Is it possible to use Mechanical Turk for longer studies?
* Are there any important tips for effectively using Mechanical Turk for longer studies?
* Are there any tutorials or case studies which document successful methods for using Mechanical Turk for longer studies?
* Or alternatively are there better systems for recruiting paid participants for longer online studies?

In general I appreciate that longer studies would require much more remuneration probably more than just a multiple of the amount of time.
I also imagine that there would be additional issues of quality control.

**Tags:** methodology, internet, mechanical-turk

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: There are no real restrictions on what you can do for an mturk study; all experiment code can be hosted and run on your own servers.  
> **username_2**: What is the main motivation for using mturk (or generally, online workforce)? Is it because you need more participants than you can recruit using conventional methods? Because you want a long study that won't require your participants to come to the lab every day? Some other reason?  
> **username_0**: @ofri I imagine speed of recruitment and cost effectiveness are the two main motivations. For example, If I could get 200 conscientious participants to complete a 30 minute study for US\$5 or US\$10 per participant, and it could all be finalised in a day or so, that would make my life a lot easier. mturk manages payment and it also manages the mapping of free time to tasks.  
> **username_0**: @jeff It's good that it's possible, but I get the impression that there might be additional issues with longer studies around motivating participants to complete the task in the first place and ensuring that they perform the task conscientiously.  

---

## 2 answers

### Answer by username_0 on 2013-05-10. Score: 3

*I've just started reading up on Mechanical Turk. This is a summary of some of the tips that I've found. Admittedly, most of it applies generally to psychological experiments, and not specifically to longer ones.*

David Sharek [discusses his workflow which explicitly includes studies in the 30 minute range](http://www.playgraph.com/2010/bits/experiments-using-mechanical-turk-part-1). Thus, this post is one of the most relevant for dealing with the issue of longer studies.

### Assorted resources

Here are some other assorted resources; see also the references at the bottom.

* [Interoperating Inquisit with other tools](http://www.millisecond.com/support/docs/v4/html/howto/interopsurveys.htm)
* [TurkGate](https://github.com/gideongoldin/TurkGate) is an open source tool to facilitate the use of Mechanical Turk with external psychology experiments.
* Mason and Suri (2012) review the potential benefits, implementation, and ethics of Mechanical Turk.
* **Michael Buhrmester** has a [guide for social scientists](http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/gosling/reprints/MTurkhowto.pdf). He provides an outline of his workflow when running studies.

Assorted blogs relevant to Mechanical Turk mentioned by Buhrmester

* <http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com>.
* <http://experimentalturk.wordpress.com>.
* <http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/deneme>.
* <http://blog.crowdflower.com>.

### Configuring external surveys

The general model seems to be to have a link to an external site (make sure it opens in a new tab or window) where the survey is delivered and a box for the completion code to be entered.

Buhrmester discusses various completion code systems and opted for the relatively low tech option of getting participants to make up a 4 or 5 digit number and enter it both into the survey and into the mturk. He then uses time stamp data to verify the original completer.

### Payment

Mason and Suri state

> However, recent research on the behavior of workers (Chilton et al.,
> 2010) demonstrated that workers had a reservation wage (the least
> amount of pay for which they would do the task) of only \$1.38 per
> hour, with an average effective hourly wage of $4.80 for workers
> (Ipeirotis, 2010a).

In terms of the relationship between payment and quality of worker they cite studies suggesting that there is an initial positive relationship that levels off at a certain point such that at a certain point additional payment does not improve performance.
Masson and Suri then suggest:

> Consequently, it is often advisable to start by paying less than the
> expected reservation wage, and then increasing the wage if the rate of
> completed work is too low.

Similarly wages up to a point should increase the speed of data collection.

### Rejection of hits

Regarding rejecting hits, Michael has simply accepted all hits. This may be simpler than trying to work out which hits are legitimate. This also made sense given that he was often only paying 10 cents per participant for 10 minute experiments. It also has the benefit of not damaging your reputation.

### Quality assurance

There are two issues here. Did the participant complete the study at all? And did they complete the study in an appropriate manner (e.g., trying on performance task; reading instructions properly; etc.)?

A general approach is to incorporate additional means to usual for detecting dodgy data.
If it's simple to filter out such participants then they don't corrupt the final dataset.

A few ideas:

* item level reaction time measures
* response patterns to negative and positively worded items
* repeat items which should yield identical responses
* performance measures
* Include very simple true-false questions (e.g., 2+2; Who is the president of the United States); Mason and Suri mention that in 500 responses only six got it wrong and three didn't answer.

Buhrmester makes the causal observation that the quality of responses may vary based on the country of responders, so for example limited participation to US participants is one coarse means of filtering for quality.

### Managing reputation as a requester

Buhrmester mentions accepting all hits both for simplicity and managing reptuation.

Mason and Suri (2012) discuss how reputation is discussed and monitored on external sites.

> Turkopticon is a site that allows workers to rate requesters along four
> axes: communicativity, generosity, fairness, and promptness. Turker
> Nation is an online bulletin board where workers routinely comment on
> requesters and communicate about individual HITs. It is strongly
> encouraged that new requesters “introduce” them- selves to the
> Mechanical Turk community by first posting to Turker Nation before
> putting up HITs.

### References

* Rand, D. G. (2012). The promise of Mechanical Turk: How online labor markets can help theorists run behavioral experiments. Journal of theoretical biology, 299, 172-179.
* Buhrmester, M., Kwang, T., & Gosling, S.D. (2011). Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: A New Source of Inexpensive, Yet High-Quality, Data? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(1), 3-5.
* Mason, W., & Suri, S. (2012). Conducting behavioral research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Behavior research methods, 44(1), 1-23.
* Berinsky, A. J., Huber, G. A., & Lenz, G. S. (2011). Using Mechanical Turk as a subject recruitment tool for experimental research. Submitted for review.
* Berinsky, A. J., Huber, G. A., & Lenz, G. S. (2012). Evaluating online labor markets for experimental research: Amazon. com's mechanical turk. Political Analysis, 20(3), 351-368.


---

### Answer by username_3 on 2015-01-14. Score: 2

You may want to take a look at [SurveyComet.com](https://www.surveycomet.com) and [TurkPrime.com](https://www.TurkPrime.com). Both offer a pretty nice set of tools to run externally hosted surveys (like on Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey) and allow you to create follow up surveys, exclude previous workers, have specific demographic Panels and much more.

A long survey can be broken into two parts. Launch part 1 and later part2 as a follow up which will only be open to those who took part 1.

Disclaimer: I am part of the software development team and am currently working on those sites.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: A quick look suggests the pricing seems reasonable. I'd be curious to know: (a) what proportion of participants tend to complete longer surveys conscientiously - i.e., not skipping questions or responding randomly; (b) whether you can use external tools that require installation of a plugin - in particular, [Inquisit](http://www.millisecond.com/) is a powerful tool for running online psych experiments, but it does require the user to install a plugin.  
> **username_3**: A. SurveyComet workers are monitored to ensure a high degree of reliability and internal tests have shown that random submissions are rare (<1%). B. Mechanical Turk does not allow requesters to ask workers to install programs so using inquisit is a violation of Amazon's terms of service  
> **username_3**: @JeromyAnglim  Although you may possibly get around the MTurk Terms of Service requirement by stating that the HIT is only open to Workers who have _previously_ downloaded Inquisit. So the download is not _part_ of the HIT.  

---

