Conducting Clinical Research Using Crowdsourced Convenience Samples

Crowdsourcing has had a dramatic impact on the speed and scale at which scientific research can be conducted. Clinical scientists have particularly benefited from readily available research study participants and streamlined recruiting and payment systems afforded by Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk),...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Annual review of clinical psychology 2016-03, Vol.12 (1), p.53-81
Main Authors: Chandler, Jesse, Shapiro, Danielle
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Biomedical Research - standards
Biomedical Research - statistics & numerical data
Crowdsourcing - standards
Crowdsourcing - statistics & numerical data
Humans
Internet research methods
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Request full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Crowdsourcing has had a dramatic impact on the speed and scale at which scientific research can be conducted. Clinical scientists have particularly benefited from readily available research study participants and streamlined recruiting and payment systems afforded by Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a popular labor market for crowdsourcing workers. MTurk has been used in this capacity for more than five years. The popularity and novelty of the platform have spurred numerous methodological investigations, making it the most studied nonprobability sample available to researchers. This article summarizes what is known about MTurk sample composition and data quality with an emphasis on findings relevant to clinical psychological research. It then addresses methodological issues with using MTurk-many of which are common to other nonprobability samples but unfamiliar to clinical science researchers-and suggests concrete steps to avoid these issues or minimize their impact.
ISSN:1548-5943
1548-5951
DOI:10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-021815-093623