Crowdsourcing methods in addiction science: Emerging research and best practices.

Abstract

Crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, Prolific, and Qualtrics Panels have become a dominant form of sampling in recent years. Crowdsourcing enables researchers to effectively and efficiently sample research participants with greater geographic variability, access to hard-to-reach populations, and reduced costs. These methods have been increasingly used across varied areas of psychological science and essential for research during the COVID-19 pandemic due to their facilitation of remote research. Recent work documents methods for improving data quality, emerging crowdsourcing platforms, and how crowdsourcing data fit within broader research programs. Addiction scientists will benefit from the adoption of best practice guidelines in crowdsourcing as well as developing novel approaches, venues, and applications to advance the field.

Perceptions and Attitudes Related to Driving after Cannabis Use in Canadian and US Adults

“…Although front-end qualifications were employed (i.e., minimum number of previous MTurk submissions, approval ratings, and IP address tracking), these may not be sufficient to ensure data integrity. Although multi-stage attention checks and data screening are now considered best practice standards in crowdsourcing, 51,52 the current data were collected at a time when the full extent of the data integrity issues with crowdsourcing was not well understood. Interpretations of the MTurk results should be made with appropriate caution.…”

The social life of digital methods in psychology: Situating digital methods in the new data politics

“…The ascendance of platforms such as Amazon's MTurk as a research tool can be attributed to the unparalleled ease, speed, and cost-effectiveness with which researchers can use it to deliver surveys, psychometric instruments, and digitalized experiments to a large and ostensibly more diverse sample at very low cost (Strickland et al, 2022).…”

“…The ascendance of platforms such as Amazon's MTurk as a research tool can be attributed to the unparalleled ease, speed, and cost‐effectiveness with which researchers can use it to deliver surveys, psychometric instruments, and digitalized experiments to a large and ostensibly more diverse sample at very low cost (Strickland et al., 2022). Although several disciplines have turned to MTurk for data, it appears to have struck a chord with psychologists as a key means to address methodological shortcomings highlighted by the replication crisis that is, excessive reliance on North American college student samples, and low statistical power (Smith et al., 2019).…”

Research on privacy protection strategies in distributed crowdsourcing system

“…Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and enterprise production model. With the explosive growth of the internet and widespread accessibility, there has been a surge in research activity in crowdsourcing [2] . Currently, all crowdsourcing applications are developed in a particular way, and much of the work is focused on different aspects of crowdsourcing, such as computing technology and performance analysis.…”