An online daily diary study of alcohol use using Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Abstract

In recent years, unprecedented levels of Internet access and the widespread growth of emergent communication technologies have resulted in significantly greater population access for substance use researchers. Despite the research potential of such technologies, the use of the Internet to recruit individuals for participation in event-level research has been limited. The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief account of the methods and results from an online daily diary study of alcohol use. Participants were recruited using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Eligible participants completed a brief screener assessing demographics and health behaviours, with a subset of individuals subsequently recruited to participate in a 2 week daily diary study of alcohol use. Multilevel models of the daily alcohol data derived from the Mechanical Turk sample (n = 369) replicated several findings commonly reported in daily diary studies of alcohol use. Results demonstrate that online participant recruitment and survey administration can be a fruitful method for conducting daily diary alcohol research.