Recruiting Subjects for Online Surveys: Facebook versus Mechanical Turk

SPRING 2015 RESEARCH INCUBATION AWARDEE 

Dino Christenson (Political Science, College of Arts & Sciences) and Taylor Boas (Political Science, College of Arts & Sciences)

Many fields of study, from public health to psychology to political science, increasingly use online surveys as a research method. This project constitutes the first head-to-head comparison of convenience samples of online survey respondents recruited from the two most common sources: Facebook and Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. The research is valuable to scholars from a variety of fields considering online surveys for their own work.

Planning to conduct N=2000 online surveys in both India and the United States, researchers for this project are recruiting half of the respondents from each country through Facebook advertisements and half through Mechanical Turk. Survey questions cover demographics, subject attentiveness, and political knowledge and attitudes. Questions are drawn from prior surveys involving face-to-face interviews with nationally representative samples, aiming to directly compare online recruitment to traditional methods.

This work is funded by a Hariri Research Award made in June, 2015.