Rinderknecht R Gordon, Doan Long, Sayer Liana C
RAND, Arlington, VA, USA.
Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA.
Sociol Methodol. 2025 Jan 25. doi: 10.1177/00811750241312226.
Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and Prolific are popular online platforms for connecting academic researchers with respondents. A broad literature has sought to assess the extent to which these respondents are representative of the U.S. population in terms of their demographic background, yet no work has assessed the representativeness of their daily lives. The authors provide this analysis by collecting time diaries from 136 MTurk and 156 Prolific respondents, which they compare with diary responses from 468 contemporaneous responses to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS). Responses from MTurk and Prolific respondents include several notable differences relative to ATUS responses, including doing less housework and care work, spending less time traveling, spending more time at home, and spending more time alone. In general, MTurk respondents worked more than ATUS respondents, and Prolific respondents spent more time in leisure. These differences persist even after adjusting for demographic differences. The present findings highlight time use as a potential major source of differences across samples that go beyond demographic differences. Thus, scholars interested in these samples should consider how time use may moderate processes of interest.
亚马逊的土耳其机器人（MTurk）和Prolific是将学术研究人员与受访者联系起来的热门在线平台。大量文献试图评估这些受访者在人口背景方面在多大程度上代表了美国人口，但尚无研究评估他们日常生活的代表性。作者通过收集136名MTurk受访者和156名Prolific受访者的时间日记进行了这项分析，并将其与468名同期参与美国时间使用调查（ATUS）的受访者的日记回复进行比较。MTurk和Prolific受访者的回复与ATUS的回复存在一些显著差异，包括家务和照料工作做得更少、旅行时间更少、在家时间更多以及独处时间更多。总体而言，MTurk受访者比ATUS受访者工作更多，而Prolific受访者休闲时间更多。即使在调整了人口差异之后，这些差异仍然存在。目前的研究结果突出了时间使用是样本间差异的一个潜在主要来源，这种差异超出了人口差异。因此，对这些样本感兴趣的学者应考虑时间使用可能如何调节相关过程。
