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Abstract
One of the most notable recent developments in survey research is the increased usage of online convenience samples drawn from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). While scholars have noted various social and political differences (e.g., age, partisanship) between MTurk and population-based samples, the breadth and depth of these variations remain unclear. We investigate the extent to which MTurk samples differ from population samples, and the underlying nature of these differences. We do so by replicating items from the population-based American National Election Studies (ANES) 2012 Time Series Study in a survey administered to a sample of MTurk respondents. With few exceptions, we not only find that MTurk respondents differ significantly from respondents completing the 2012 ANES via the Web but also that most differences are reduced considerably when controlling for easily measurable sample features. Thus, MTurk respondents do not appear to differ fundamentally from population-based respondents in unmeasurable ways. This suggests that MTurk data can be used to advance research programs, particularly if researchers measure and account for a range of political and demographic variables as needed.
Highlights
Surveys remain fundamental to the study of public opinion and political behavior
We address whether measurable features can explain raw descriptive sample differences; that is, can differences between the samples in more specific variables be explained by more basic and well-known demographic and political variables? If so, Mechanical Turk (MTurk) samples could provide a fruitful resource for hypothesis generation and testing for observational researchers of
Compared with the American National Election Studies (ANES) sample, the MTurk sample contains about the same percentage of Whites (71.8% vs. 70.5%), but significantly smaller percentages of Blacks (7.1% vs. 12.2%) and Hispanics or Latino/as (5.6% vs. 11.2%)
Summary
Surveys remain fundamental to the study of public opinion and political behavior. At the same time, a number of significant developments over the past few decades have transformed survey methodology.
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