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

Conducting Research: How Online Research Tools Can Help

Leib Litman, PhD
December 22, 2017

Conducting Research: How Online Research Tools Can Help

When researchers learn about conducting research online, it can sometimes be difficult to understand quite how all the tools that are available can actually be applied to a project. This post is about how specific research ideas can be carried...

New Feature: Exclude Highly Active Workers

Leib Litman, PhD
December 15, 2017

New Feature: Exclude Highly Active Workers

Some workers on MTurk are extremely active, and take the majority of posted HITs. This can lead to many issues, some of which are outlined in our previous post. Although MTurk has over 100,000 workers who take surveys each year,...

Best Recruitment Practices: Working With Issues of Non-Naivete on MTurk

Leib Litman, PhD
December 8, 2017

Best Recruitment Practices: Working With Issues of Non-Naivete on MTurk

It is important to consider how many highly experienced workers there are on Mechanical Turk. As discussed in previous posts, there is a population pool of active workers in the thousands, but this is far from exhaustible. A small group...

Are MTurk Workers Who They Say They Are?

Leib Litman, PhD
December 1, 2017

Are MTurk Workers Who They Say They Are?

The internet has the reputation of being a place where people can hide in anonymity, and present as being very different people than who they actually are. Is this a problem on Mechanical Turk? Is the self-reported information provided by...

Strengths and Limitations of Mechanical Turk

Leib Litman, PhD
November 21, 2017

Strengths and Limitations of Mechanical Turk

Hundreds of academic papers are published each year using data collected through Mechanical Turk. Researchers have gravitated to Mechanical Turk primarily because it provides high quality data quickly and affordably. However, Mechanical Turk has strengths and weaknesses as a platform...

Select MTurk Workers by Big Five Personality Types

Jonathan Robinson, PhD
October 31, 2017

Select MTurk Workers by Big Five Personality Types

Run Studies Targeting Specific Big Five Personality Types CloudResearch introduces a new Big Five personality types qualification: Now social science researchers can run studies targeted to the Big Five: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness, and Neuroticism. Each personality type can be specified...

Restarts Now Available When Using HyperBatch

Sam Krumholtz
February 28, 2017

Restarts Now Available When Using HyperBatch

“Restart HIT” Using HyperBatch The CloudResearch “Restart” feature (which Restarts HITs that have become sluggish; see our blog post on Restarts to see all the benefits of this feature) can now be used in conjunction with HyperBatch. This was a...

Verified US Region Targeting

CloudResearch
December 2, 2016

Verified US Region Targeting

Many researchers wish to target participants from specific states or regions of the United States like the Northeast or the West. The problem they often encounter is that using MTurk’s Geographic Qualification to specify a particular state is often not...

Dynamic Secret Completion Codes for SurveyMonkey and Alchemer (formerly SurveyGizmo)

CloudResearch
December 2, 2016

Dynamic Secret Completion Codes for SurveyMonkey and Alchemer (formerly SurveyGizmo)

CloudResearch now supports dynamic completion codes for SurveyMonkey and Alchemer (formerly SurveyGizmo) studies. Dynamic codes ensure each MTurk worker receives a unique completion code, eliminating code sharing and enabling auto-approval...

How to Create a Universal Exclude Worker List

Jonathan Robinson, PhD
September 9, 2016

How to Create a Universal Exclude Worker List

Problem: Requesters may observe that some workers, even those with high Approval ratings, may not perform to their expectations on a study. Sometimes this may result in rejecting their work which affects the Worker approval rating. But, often the work...

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