Amazon's Mechanical Turk for Academics: The HIT Handbook for Social Science Research by Kim Bartel Sheehan and Matthew Pittman

I am pleased to announce the publication of Amazon's Mechanical Turk for Academics: The HIT Handbook for Social Science Research by Kim Bartel Sheehan and Matthew Pittman (Melvin & Leigh, Publishers, 2016, Paper $29.95)

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for Academics is a handy, inexpensive guide for researchers wishing to make the most out of MTurk. Kim Sheehan and Matthew Pittman walk readers through the basics of setting up a study—from choosing a survey platform, to obtaining IRB approvals, to recruiting and paying respondents.

Mechanical Turk is Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform connecting online workers with people who have small tasks (called Human Information Tasks or HITS) for people to complete online. For academic researchers, Mechanical Turk provides access to thousands of potential research study participants. Data can be collected quickly and relatively inexpensively, and studies using data collected via Mechanical Turk have been published in dozens of academic journals in disciplines such as psychology, marketing, computer science, and communications.

Throughout the book, tips from a variety of researchers in different disciplines provide a level of insight that will make even the MTurk Newbies confident about conducting their first studies on the platform. Academic researchers will find themselves returning to the book for every new study they undertake.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for Academics is available for purchase from Amazon in paperback (http://bit.ly/1TRGrrk) and as an eBook (http://bit.ly/1MbFaJ4).