Blog

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

Aaron Moss, PhD
June 25, 2019

How Many Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers Are There in 2019?

Amazon Mturk has become a go-to platform for researchers sourcing survey participants, but how many workers use it? See estimates from our recent study here

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Aaron Moss, PhD
April 10, 2019

How to Award a Bonus to MTurk Workers Using CloudResearch

One feature of Mechanical Turk is the ability of researchers to give workers bonus payments. Bonuses may be issued for various reasons such as exemplary performance on a task, answering extra questions in a study, or as a reward for...

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Aaron Moss, PhD
March 15, 2019

Understanding Turkers: How Do Gig Economy Workers Use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk?

By now, most people have heard of the gig economy and have some idea of how it works. In the gig economy, people perform short-term jobs or tasks to earn money. Gig economy jobs are considered independent or contract work, meaning people who work in the gig economy often trade the benefits and stability of traditional employment for the freedom and flexibility to decide when and how much they work.

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Aaron Moss, PhD
March 1, 2019

How Do Most MTurk Workers Work?

A persistent cause of concern for researchers who conduct studies online is understanding what participants might be doing while completing their study. When participants are outside the lab, they cannot be observed and distracting aspects of the environment cannot be controlled by the research team. As a result, researchers are left to wonder: how much attention are participants giving my survey?

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Aaron Moss, PhD
February 21, 2019

How to Easily Run a Pilot Study on CloudResearch

Last month, we published a blog titled, “Five Things You Should Not Be Doing in Online Data Collection.” Among the things we identified that you should not be doing was launching your study without piloting it first. As a way...

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Aaron Moss, PhD
February 14, 2019

Transfer Funds From One CloudResearch User to Another

Academic research is a collaborative endeavor. Faculty members work with post-docs, grad students, and undergrads. Sometimes one lab collaborates with another. During the course of such work, resources sometimes need to be shared or redistributed. At CloudResearch, we have sought...

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Aaron Moss, PhD
February 7, 2019

Spread Your Data Collection Over Days or Weeks With MicroBatch

One reason Amazon Mechanical Turk has become so popular among researchers is the speed with which data can be collected. Compared to more traditional research methods — lab-based experiments, field studies, ethnographic interviews, etc. — MTurk is exceptionally fast, making...

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Aaron Moss, PhD
January 31, 2019

Tips for Navigating the CloudResearch Dashboard

Overview of CloudResearch Dashboard changes and navigation tips for improved user experience.

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Aaron Moss, PhD
January 24, 2019

Five Things You Should NOT Be Doing in Online Data Collection

Three weeks ago, we published a blog explaining five things you should be doing in your online data collection. In this blog, we follow up with five things you should NOT be doing when collecting data on MTurk.

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Aaron Moss, PhD
January 17, 2019

Revisiting CloudResearch’s Survey Group Feature

What Is a Survey Group? Survey Groups are one of the most powerful and dynamic tools on CloudResearch for controlling which workers are eligible and ineligible for your study. A Survey Group is exactly what it sounds like: a collection...

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