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Read our latest articles for tips, tricks, advice and news about research techniques and solutions.

Recruiting Older Adults Online

Richa Gautam
November 21, 2018

Recruiting Older Adults Online

People of different ages vary greatly in their beliefs and behaviors. For example, a recent Pew report outlines wide generational gaps in people’s opinions on several political issues like presidential job approval, perceptions of racism, views on immigration, and political ideology (Pew Research Center, 2018). Furthermore, some issues, like the use of Medicare, depend on age and therefore are more relevant to older adults than younger ones.

Creating Compensation HITs for Mechanical Turk Workers

Aaron Moss, PhD
November 15, 2018

Creating Compensation HITs for Mechanical Turk Workers

At CloudResearch, we advocate for requesters to treat workers fairly when posting HITs on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Workers are, after all, the people who make the research possible. Sometimes situations arise in which an MTurk worker is unable to receive payment, despite having completed a survey. Below are two common scenarios in which a worker may not be paid, despite completing a survey:

Running Dyadic Studies on Mechanical Turk Using CloudResearch

Sam Krumholtz
November 8, 2018

Running Dyadic Studies on Mechanical Turk Using CloudResearch

Studying pairs of people (e.g., married couples, friends, coworkers, etc) is becoming increasingly common in the social and behavioral sciences. Online participant populations, such as Mechanical Turk and other online panels, can potentially serve as a rich source of dyadic...

Moving Beyond Bots: MTurk as a Source of High Quality Data

Leib Litman, PhD
October 29, 2018

Moving Beyond Bots: MTurk as a Source of High Quality Data

About a month ago, we published After the Bot Scare blog on workers providing bad quality data on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. This month, we followed up with our “farmers” to assess the effectiveness of the tools we created to deal with the problem. In this blog, we present data from our follow-up study and evidence to suggest our tools are working.

How to Obtain an Online National Sample Stratified by Wealth

Aaron Moss, PhD
October 10, 2018

How to Obtain an Online National Sample Stratified by Wealth

A Case Study From a Recent JESP Article A new study appearing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests Americans strongly believe in economic mobility because they fail to appreciate how vast wealth inequality really is. In this blog,...

The Universal Exclude List: A Tool for Blocking Bad Workers

Aaron Moss, PhD
October 4, 2018

The Universal Exclude List: A Tool for Blocking Bad Workers

By now, even casual users of MTurk have heard about recent concerns of “bots” or low quality data. We’ve written about the topic here and laid out evidence that suggests “bots” are actually foreign workers using tools to obscure their true location (here). Perhaps most importantly, we’ve created two tools to help keep these workers out of your studies. In this blog, we introduce a third tool: the Universal Exclude List.

After the Bot Scare: Understanding What’s Been Happening With Data Collection on MTurk and How to Stop It

Aaron Moss, PhD
September 18, 2018

After the Bot Scare: Understanding What’s Been Happening With Data Collection on MTurk and How to Stop It

In this blog, we review recent concerns about bots, along with general data quality issues, on Mechanical Turk and report the results of a study we conducted to investigate the problem.

CloudResearch Tools to Help Combat Responses from Suspicious Geolocations

Aaron Moss, PhD
August 15, 2018

CloudResearch Tools to Help Combat Responses from Suspicious Geolocations

Last week, the research community was struck with concern that “bots” were contaminating data collection on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). We wrote about the issue and conducted our own preliminary investigation into the problem using the CloudResearch database. In this blog, we introduce two new tools CloudResearch is launching to help researchers combat suspicious activity on MTurk and reiterate some of the important takeaways from this conversation so far.

Concerns About Bots on Mechanical Turk: Problems and Solutions

Aaron Moss, PhD
August 10, 2018

Concerns About Bots on Mechanical Turk: Problems and Solutions

When researchers collect data online, it’s natural to be concerned about data quality. Participants aren’t in the lab, so researchers can’t see who is taking their survey, what those participants are doing while answering questions, or whether participants are who they say they are. Not knowing is unsettling.

MicroBatch Is Now a Pro Feature

Leib Litman, PhD
January 11, 2018

MicroBatch Is Now a Pro Feature

CloudResearch is announcing a change in our pricing for the MicroBatch feature. MicroBatch is now included as a Pro feature, with a fee of 2 cents + 5% per complete. This will also provide users with access to all other...

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