A beginner’s guide and best practices for using crowdsourcing platforms for survey research: The Case of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)

Researchers around the globe are utilizing crowdsourcing tools to reach respondents for quantitative and qualitative research (Chambers & Nimon, 2019). Many social science and business journals are receiving studies that utilize crowdsourcing tools such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), Qualtrics, MicroWorkers, ShortTask, ClickWorker, and Crowdsource (e.g., Ahn, & Back, 2019; Ali et al., 2021; Esfahani, & Ozturk, 2019; Jeong, & Lee, 2017; Zhang et al., 2017). Even though the use of these tools presents a great opportunity for sharing large quantities of data quickly, some challenges must also be addressed. The purpose of this guide is to present the basic ideas behind the use of crowdsourcing for survey research and provide a primer for best practices that will increase their validity and reliability.