Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as a Viable Source for Organizational and Occupational Health Research

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is an increasingly popular method for organizational and occupational health research. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is at the forefront of this trend, but few studies have examined the labor market characteristics of MTurk workers (Turkers) or results of organizational and occupational health data as compared to published benchmarks. To address these gaps, we review the current MTurk literature and present the results of a multi-wave study of Turker labor characteristics and organizational and occupational health variable relationships. We found Turkers to be broadly distributed across the labor market, indicating MTurk is a viable option for both generalizable and understudied samples, as well as a source for targeted occupational sectors. Additionally, we found effect size magnitudes to be comparable to published benchmarks, and data displayed high levels of test-retest reliability and stability of relationships across time. Our results support the use of MTurk as a viable source for organizational and occupational health research assuming general methodological concerns and validity threats are addressed (see Cheung et al. Journal of Business and Psychology 1–15, 2016).