Researchers Investigate Problems with MTurk Data
Some psychological researchers and other social scientists are warning about a possible problem with survey data being collected through the widely-used online tool Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk).
The researchers recently detected a noticeable number of survey responses from repeating GPS coordinates, indicating the presence of possible bots with spoof accounts. More details on the issue can be found online (here and here), along with a proposed standardized procedure to test whether responses from repeating GPS coordinates provide evidentiary value.
University of Minnesota graduate student Hui Bai is working with others to assess the scale of the issue by inviting researchers to complete an online questionnaire. The first results from that survey will be posted August 15.
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