Blog

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

Announcing the CloudResearch Suggestion Box

Aaron Moss, PhD
January 10, 2019

Announcing the CloudResearch Suggestion Box

A new year represents the opportunity to consider priorities, set goals, chart new courses of action, and decide how to move forward in the coming months. At CloudResearch, we’re moving into 2019 looking for ways to expand the tools and...

Read More >
Five Things You Should Be Doing in Online Data Collection

Aaron Moss, PhD
January 3, 2019

Five Things You Should Be Doing in Online Data Collection

Researchers are responsible for being an expert, or at least knowledgeable, in several areas. There’s the topic of your research, the methods common within your discipline, best practices for open science, and the mediums used to communicate about your work—just to name a few. For many researchers, online data collection has been revolutionary, helping collect data faster and more affordably than ever before.

Read More >
Including and Excluding Participants From Studies Run Through CloudResearch: What, When and How

Richa Gautam
December 27, 2018

Including and Excluding Participants From Studies Run Through CloudResearch: What, When and How

In this blog, we explain everything you could ever want to know about including and excluding participants from studies while using CloudResearch. In last week’s blog on longitudinal studies, we described our Include Workers feature, but this blog digs into the nitty-gritty and explains what our features are, when you might want to use them, and how they work.

Read More >
Running Longitudinal Studies on CloudResearch

Sam Krumholtz
December 20, 2018

Running Longitudinal Studies on CloudResearch

In this blog, we describe how to run a longitudinal study on MTurk, using CloudResearch. We also provide tips for maximizing worker participation and minimizing attrition.

Read More >
Understanding Geolocations and Their Connection to Data Quality

Richa Gautam
December 12, 2018

Understanding Geolocations and Their Connection to Data Quality

In this blog, we outline the history of our Block Duplicate Geolocations tool, provide an overview of what geolocations are and the information they convey, and present the results of a study that examined the quality of data obtained from repeated geolocations that are not linked to server farms. We conclude by outlining the steps we are taking to change the default options on our Block Duplicate Geolocations feature.

Read More >
How to Gather Demographically-Representative Samples in Online Studies

Aaron Moss, PhD
December 7, 2018

How to Gather Demographically-Representative Samples in Online Studies

Most social science research relies on convenience sampling of participants, meaning few samples look like let alone represent the general population. For many research questions, convenience samples are not a problem. Yet, for other questions, being able to capture and represent the opinions of people from different groups is essential. Because most researchers do not routinely gather these kinds of samples, knowing where to find one when it’s needed can be difficult.

Read More >
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.

Read More >
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:

Read More >
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...

Read More >
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.

Read More >

SUBSCRIBE TO RECEIVE UPDATES

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.