Although participants with psychiatric symptoms, specific risk factors, or rare demographic characteristics can be difficult to identify and recruit for participation in research, participants with these characteristics are crucial for research in the social, behavioral, and clinical sciences. Online research in general and crowdsourcing software in particular may offer a solution. However, no research to date has examined the utility of crowdsourcing software for conducting research on psychopathology. In the current study, we examined the prevalence of several psychiatric disorders and related problems, as well as the reliability and validity of participant reports on these domains, among users of Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Findings suggest that crowdsourcing software offers several advantages for clinical research while providing insight into potential problems, such as misrepresentation, that researchers should address when collecting data online.

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.

Clinical psychological research studies often require individuals with specific characteristics. The Internet can be used to recruit broadly, enabling the recruitment of rare groups such as people with specific psychological disorders. However, Internet-based research relies on participant self-report to determine eligibility, and thus, data quality depends on participant honesty. For those rare groups, even low levels of participant dishonesty can lead to a substantial proportion of fraudulent survey responses, and all studies will include careless respondents who do not pay attention to questions, do not understand them, or provide intentionally wrong responses. Poor-quality responses should be thought of as categorically different from high-quality responses. Including these responses will lead to the overestimation of the prevalence of rare groups and incorrect estimates of scale reliability, means, and correlations between constructs. We demonstrate that for these reasons, including poor-quality responses-which are usually positively skewed-will lead to several data-quality problems including spurious associations between measures. We provide recommendations about how to ensure that fraudulent participants are detected and excluded from self-report research studies.

Although stepmothering is a common undertaking in American families, little research has investigated the mental health consequences, and their correlates, associated with adopting a stepmother role. To help fill this gap, the current study examines parenting stress and participants' perceptions of their (step)children's regard toward them and the family as mediators in the relation between parenting role (stepmother or biological mother) and depressive symptoms. Participants included 60 biological mothers and 75 stepmothers living in the United States. Stepmothers reported more depressive symptoms and parenting stress and lower perceptions of child regard than did biological mothers. Further, the relation between parenting role and depressive symptoms was mediated by parenting stress and perceptions of child regard. Results suggest that stepmothers are at risk for depressive symptoms and illuminate possible contributors to this risk, providing important directions for research and intervention.

This study examines the role of legal and social context (the level of legal and social support offered by one's country of residence) and sexual orientation in the mental health of lesbian and heterosexual mothers. Participants were sampled from the United States and Canada because the two countries have many similarities (North American location, reliance on English language, and democratic structures) but provide different legal and social rights to their lesbian citizens. The study included 52 lesbian mothers and 153 heterosexual mothers in the United States and 35 lesbian mothers and 42 heterosexual mothers in Canada. Although there were no differences between heterosexual mothers as a function of legal and social context, lesbian mothers from the United States reported more family worries about legal status and discrimination (but not more general family worries) and more depressive symptoms than did lesbian mothers in Canada. Results indicate that legal and social context moderates the role of sexual orientation in maternal mental health.