Crowdsourcing good data : practical applications for collecting data online

Author / Creator

de la Garza, Bernardo, author

Available as

Online

Summary

As online data collection has become more commonplace, researchers are now presented with a variety of platforms for this task. Such platforms as Qualtrics, Survey Monkey, and Amazon's MTurk crowds...

As online data collection has become more commonplace, researchers are now presented with a variety of platforms for this task. Such platforms as Qualtrics, Survey Monkey, and Amazon's MTurk crowdsourcing are now becoming practical options for researchers to collect data for a number of reasons. In contrast to in-person data collection, online data collection may provide researchers seeking to reach a broader audience or a particular population of interest with greater flexibility to collect data (e.g., data collection time, availability of resources, and geographical location) and eliminate potential experimenter bias. Yet as with any data collection method, several benefits and limitations of using online platforms exist and need to be considered prior to collecting data. Throughout this case study, we discuss issues that we encountered with data collection from in-person and online settings, and we specifically discuss the issues researchers need to consider prior to using online data collection platforms.

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