Are your participants gaming the system? Screening Mechanical Turk workers

JS Downs, MB Holbrook, S Sheng… - Proceedings of the …, 2010 - dl.acm.org
JS Downs, MB Holbrook, S Sheng, LF Cranor
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, 2010dl.acm.org
In this paper we discuss a screening process used in conjunction with a survey administered
via Amazon. com's Mechanical Turk. We sought an easily implementable method to
disqualify those people who participate but don't take the study tasks seriously. By using two
previously pilot tested screening questions, we identified 764 of 1,962 people who did not
answer conscientiously. Young men seem to be most likely to fail the qualification task.
Those that are professionals, students, and non-workers seem to be more likely to take the …
In this paper we discuss a screening process used in conjunction with a survey administered via Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk. We sought an easily implementable method to disqualify those people who participate but don't take the study tasks seriously. By using two previously pilot tested screening questions, we identified 764 of 1,962 people who did not answer conscientiously. Young men seem to be most likely to fail the qualification task. Those that are professionals, students, and non-workers seem to be more likely to take the task seriously than financial workers, hourly workers, and other workers. Men over 30 and women were more likely to answer seriously.
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