Stone Arthur A, Walentynowicz Marta, Schneider Stefan, Junghaenel Doerte U, Wen Cheng K
Dornsife Center for Self-Report Science, University of Southern California, 635 Downey WayLos Angeles, CA 90089, United States.
Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, 3620 South McClintock Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90089, United States.
Comput Human Behav. 2019 May;94:1-8. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2018.12.042. Epub 2019 Jan 4.
Amazon's MTurk platform has become a popular site for obtaining relatively inexpensive and convenient adult samples for use in behavioral research. Concerns have been raised about selection issues, because MTurk workers chose to participate in the platform and select the tasks they perform (of many offered to them). Prior studies have documented demographic and psychological differences with national samples. In this paper we studied evaluative subjective well-being (the Cantril Ladder) in an MTurk sample, a national Internet panel sample, and a national telephone survey conducted by Gallup-Sharecare. A surprising finding was that MTurk participants' Ladder scores were substantial lower than the other two samples. Analyses controlling for six demographic differences among the samples only slightly reduced the mean differences. However, patterns of demographic-well-being associations were similar within the samples. To corroborate these results, we conducted a secondary analysis on another three samples, one MTurk sample and two Internet panel samples. The same group differences in Ladder scores were observed. These findings add to the growing literature documenting the characteristics of MTurk samples and we discuss the implications for future research with such samples.
亚马逊的土耳其机器人（MTurk）平台已成为一个热门网站，可用于获取相对廉价且便捷的成人样本，以用于行为研究。由于MTurk平台的工人是自行选择参与该平台并挑选他们要执行的任务（众多提供给他们的任务中），因此人们对样本选择问题提出了担忧。先前的研究已经记录了MTurk样本与全国样本在人口统计学和心理方面的差异。在本文中，我们研究了MTurk样本、一个全国性互联网小组样本以及盖洛普-Sharecare进行的全国电话调查中的评估性主观幸福感（坎特里尔阶梯量表）。一个惊人的发现是，MTurk参与者的阶梯量表得分显著低于其他两个样本。对样本间六个人口统计学差异进行控制的分析仅略微缩小了均值差异。然而，各样本中人口统计学与幸福感之间的关联模式是相似的。为了证实这些结果，我们对另外三个样本进行了二次分析，一个MTurk样本和两个互联网小组样本。在阶梯量表得分上观察到了相同的组间差异。这些发现进一步丰富了记录MTurk样本特征的文献，并且我们讨论了对此类样本未来研究的启示。
