Using Crowdsourcing Websites for Sociological Research: The Case of Amazon Mechanical Turk

Abstract

Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace designed for crowdsourcing tasks to other people for compensation, is growing in popularity as a platform for gathering research data within the social sciences. Sociology, compared to some other social sciences, has not been as quick to adopt this form of data collection. Therefore, in this paper I overview the basics of Mechanical Turk research and suggest its pros and cons, both in general and in relation to different sociological data-collection methods and research needs. While Mechanical Turk is currently the most popular crowdsourcing website for research, I present general concepts, patterns, and suggestions that can be applied beyond Mechanical Turk to other crowdsourcing and online research.

Department(s)

Psychological Science

Keywords and Phrases

Mturk; Online research; Methods; Data collection

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

0003-1232

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jan 2016

Link to Full Text

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