Dr. Markus Jakobsson of PARC has a great article sharing 5 tips on how to perform successful research using Amazon Mechanical Turk.  Jakobsson talks about some of the pros of Mechanical Turk for research (e.g., quick access to a large pool of participants and participant anonymity) and then delves into how to navigate the possible risks and difficulties (detecting cheaters, running multi-part studies, and avoiding biasing subjects, to name a few).  It’s a really nice look at how to best make use of the tools currently available; check it out!

Today I follow up on the rest of the survey data I started analyzing in the last post.  We’ve gotten a number of new survey submissions since my last post; thanks to everyone for your data!  Since this post is a continuation of the last one, I’m going to keep analyzing the same set of responses from before — but the new responses don’t significantly change the results I’m presenting here, in any case.

Last time we talked about researchers’ specific needs in terms of experimental/research design.  This time, I’m going to cover the other aspects of running studies — participant recruitment and payment in particular.

» Continue reading “what researchers want, part 2″

We recently asked a bunch of researchers who work with human participants to tell us about their research needs.  (It’s not too late to give input!  Take our short survey here.)  We love data, and we know a lot of you also love data, so we wanted to share some of our results!

At the time of this analysis, we’ve had 72 complete or nearly complete survey responses, as well as many partial responses.  The breakdown by (not disjoint) fields of research is:

• 38 psychologists/related cognitive scientists
• 21 linguists
• 19 computer scientists
• 10 neuroscientists
• 9 people in other fields (marketing, political science, economics, education, evolutionary biology, human-environment geography)

You can see here the sample bias that our own background led to in our initial research!  Especially if your field is underrepresented in the above list, we’d love to hear about what you do.

» Continue reading “what researchers want, part 1″