Crowdsourcing Intelligent Research Participants: A Student versus MTurk Comparison

Buchheit, Steve; Dalton, Derek W.; Pollard, Troy; Stinson, Shane R.

doi:10.2308/bria-52340

Cited by 26 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Nearly half of the participant groups fall under the category of "non-specific participant", where researchers did not require participants to meet any specific technical qualification criteria. This is consistent with the conclusions in other studies: Hunt & Scheetz (2019) believe crowdsourcing platforms are best suited for obtaining average individuals within society; Farrell et al (2017) conclude that online workers can be suitable proxies in accounting research that investigates the decisions of non-experts; and Buchheit et al (2019) find that online workers are good research participants when fluid intelligence (defined in their article as general reasoning and problem-solving ability) is needed for reasonably complex experimental tasks in which incoming knowledge is not critical. However, researchers also raise potentially significant issues with the general MTurk population.…”

Section: Overview Of Mturksupporting

confidence: 90%

Amazon’s MTurk: A Currently Underutilised Resource for Survey Researchers?

Farrell

Sweeney

2021

Accounting, Finance &Amp; Governance Review

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A recent innovation in empirical academic research is the use of online labour markets as a source of data. One such market, Amazon's Mechanical Turk ("MTurk") has been used by studies published in high-quality accounting journals to source participants. Given the traction of this data source in high-calibre publications, it is timely to assess its current impact and future potential for accounting research. This paper examines the extent of adoption of MTurk as a data collection tool in leading accounting journals and specifically considers its adoption and suitability for survey research. Findings reveal that the use of MTurk in high-quality accounting publications is gathering momentum, with approximately the same number of articles published/accepted in 2019 as the total number of articles published in the preceding seven years. However, it is also found that nearly all the journal articles reviewed adopted MTurk for experimental research with only a limited presence in survey research. The study contributes to the literature by providing a comprehensive review of the adoption of MTurk in high-quality accounting journals by frequency, research method, and research participant type. Further, it analyses the unique methodological concerns that MTurk poses for survey-based accounting research, thereby providing researchers with guidance on its potential future usefulness and pitfalls to avoid. The paper concludes that difficulties in the availability of, and screening for, specific groups of participants may limit its potential for survey research until online labour market platforms are developed further.http://bit.ly/mturk1519, accessed in June 2020.

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Section: Overview Of Mturksupporting

confidence: 90%

Amazon’s MTurk: A Currently Underutilised Resource for Survey Researchers?

Farrell

Sweeney

2021

Accounting, Finance &Amp; Governance Review

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“…Participants (N = 332, M age = 37.07, SD age = 11.36, 36% female, 79% United States) 1 were recruited from Amazon's MTurk and provided monetary compensation. Prior research has supported the validity of findings obtained from MTurk participants, and we applied exclusion guidelines from these sources to ensure sufficient data quality ( Barends & de Vries, 2019 ; Buchheit, Dalton, Pollard, & Stinson, 2019 ). Only participants that had completed more than 50 MTurk tasks with greater than 95% lifetime approval were included.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who wants to reopen the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic? The daring and uncaring

Howard

2021

Personality and Individual Differences

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Economic shutdowns, which refer to disallowing employees to work on site, are among the most contentious approaches to reduce the spread of COVID-19. While economic shutdowns save lives, their large economic costs have caused some people to develop strong attitudes and even break government-issued mandates, which incurs health risks and often the need to extend the economic shutdowns. In the current article, we argue that the interaction of two personality characteristics, risk-taking tendencies and prosocial tendencies, is a strong determinant of attitudes toward economic shutdowns, and we assess the impact of this interaction on three different attitudes toward economic shutdowns that differ by their focal target: employees, customers, and organizations. The results demonstrate that this interaction significantly predicted economic shutdown attitudes toward customers and organizations but not employees. We suggest that these results can be understood via the lens of behavioral decision-making theories as well as a recent framework on antisocial risk takers, both of which provide several subsequent directions for future research. We conclude with recommendations for the development of effective messages to curb defiant behaviors toward economic shutdowns, such as focusing on those most likely to perform these problematic behaviors – the daring and uncaring.

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“…However, they may have distortions derived from the inclusion of false information (e.g., identity) and from inattention in the answers provided (Fleischer et al, 2015;Wessling et al, 2017). To deal with potential biases in the use of MTurk, it is recommended that participants with higher intelligence scores are chosen (Buchheit et al, 2019). In this study intelligence scores are higher than 90%.…”

Section: Participants and Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is value statement an effective informal control for stimulating pro-environmental behaviors?

Aguiar

2021

Rev. contab. finanç.

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This study aimed to examine when and how a pro-environmental value statement is effective at stimulating pro-environmental behavior. Specifically, it examines whether the effect of pro-environmental value statements on pro-environmental behavior depends on participation in goal setting and whether that effect is explained by goal commitment. Few recent empirical studies examine the behavioral effects of value statements, despite the potential of this informal control to stimulate appropriate behaviors. Also scarce are studies on management control examining the effects of different types of control on pro-environmental behavior. Pro-environmental behaviors are important in the business environment as they promote a reduction in pollutants and contribute to the effective design of environmental management systems and to environmental performance. Thus, it is important to identify how management control mechanisms can promote or inhibit this type of behavior. The contribution to the management control literature is to show in which context and through which process value statements can be an effective informal control. In addition, the practical implication is that decentralized organizations can benefit from the use of value statements as a control mechanism, providing they enable participation in goal setting. Participants were recruited via the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform and they had to decide about compliance with an environmental agreement in an experimental study. I manipulate the presence of a pro-environmental value statement and the participation in setting the profit goal. Research findings indicate that a pro-environmental value statement reduces commitment to the profit goal and thus increases environmental compliance, but only when the goal-setting is participative. When the goal-setting is imposed, a pro-environmental value statement does not affect commitment and environmental compliance. The main contribution is to indicate that decentralized organizations can stimulate appropriate behaviors by communicating prioritized values through a value statement when participation in goal setting is allowed.

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Crowdsourcing Intelligent Research Participants: A Student versus MTurk Comparison

Cited by 26 publications

References 45 publications

Amazon’s MTurk: A Currently Underutilised Resource for Survey Researchers?

Amazon’s MTurk: A Currently Underutilised Resource for Survey Researchers?

Who wants to reopen the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic? The daring and uncaring

Is value statement an effective informal control for stimulating pro-environmental behaviors?

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