Mathematica Policy Research.
Institute for Social Research.
Annu Rev Clin Psychol. 2016;12:53-81. doi: 10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-021815-093623. Epub 2016 Jan 11.
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.
众包对科学研究的速度和规模产生了巨大的影响。临床科学家特别受益于亚马逊土耳其机器人(MTurk)提供的现成的研究参与者和简化的招募和支付系统,MTurk 是众包工人的一个热门劳动力市场。MTurk 已经以这种身份使用了五年多。该平台的普及和新颖性激发了众多方法学研究,使其成为研究人员可获得的最具研究价值的非概率样本。本文总结了关于 MTurk 样本组成和数据质量的已知信息,重点介绍了与临床心理学研究相关的发现。然后讨论了使用 MTurk 时的方法学问题——其中许多问题与其他非概率样本相同,但临床科学研究人员不熟悉——并提出了具体步骤来避免这些问题或最小化其影响。