Briones Elizabeth M, Benham Grant
Department of Psychological Science, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, 1201 W. University Drive, Edinburg, 78539, Texas, USA.
Behav Res Methods. 2017 Feb;49(1):320-334. doi: 10.3758/s13428-016-0710-8.
Increasingly, researchers have begun to explore the potential of the Internet to reach beyond the traditional undergraduate sample. In the present study, we sought to compare the data obtained from a conventional undergraduate college-student sample to data collected via two online survey recruitment platforms. In order to examine whether the data sampled from the three populations were equivalent, we conducted a test of equivalency using inferential confidence intervals-an approach that differs from the more traditional null hypothesis significance testing. The results showed that the data obtained via the two online recruitment platforms, the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing site and the virtual environment of Second Life, were statistically equivalent to the data obtained from the college sample, on the basis of means of standardized measures of psychological stress and sleep quality. Additionally, correlations between the sleep and stress measures were not statistically different between the groups. These results, along with practical considerations for the use of these recruitment platforms, are discussed, and recommendations for other researchers who may be considering the use of these platforms are provided.
越来越多的研究人员开始探索互联网超越传统本科样本的潜力。在本研究中，我们试图将从传统本科大学生样本中获得的数据与通过两个在线调查招募平台收集的数据进行比较。为了检验从这三个人口中抽取的数据是否等效，我们使用推断性置信区间进行了等效性检验——这是一种不同于更传统的零假设显著性检验的方法。结果表明，基于心理压力和睡眠质量的标准化测量均值，通过两个在线招募平台（亚马逊土耳其机器人众包网站和第二人生虚拟环境）获得的数据在统计学上等同于从大学样本中获得的数据。此外，各群体之间睡眠和压力测量的相关性在统计学上没有差异。我们讨论了这些结果以及使用这些招募平台的实际考虑因素，并为可能考虑使用这些平台的其他研究人员提供了建议。
