Instructor’s Manual Abstracts
Vol. 2, Issue 1 IM Abstract: Using Amazon Mechanical Turk for Consumer Behaviour Research
Hamid Shaker and Ali Tezer
Case Overview
Jade Charette-Côté was a graduate student in a North American business school who recently started working on her dissertation. Charette-Côté’s dissertation examines how feelings of personal control influences consumers’ brand preference and is purposed to extend recently published work of Beck and colleagues (2020). Therefore, her objective was to replicate the main finding of Beck et al. (2020) in an experimental study. Following her supervisor’s suggestion, she prepared an experimental study on the online survey software Qualtrics and ran the experiment on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). However, inferential statistical tests revealed that she was unable to replicate the effect demonstrated by Beck et al. (2020).
Disappointed with the results, Charette-Côté took a careful look at the data and realized some unexpected patterns, which may have led to the failed replication attempt. Indeed, these patterns made her question the quality of the data, but she was not sure what the main issues were and therefore did not know how to address them in future experiments. Charette-Côté’s supervisor asked her to find best practices for collecting data using MTurk so that she could identify the issues that needed to be fixed and learn how to fix them before running a follow-up survey. She wondered how she could redesign the survey to improve reliability. Where should she start?
Learning Objectives
By working through this case, students should be able to
- Identify the roles of online crowdsourcing platforms, survey design, and data quality in consumer research.
- Summarize the challenges encountered by consumer researchers when utilizing online crowdsourcing platforms.
- Evaluate survey design strategies using online crowdsourcing platforms for consumer research.
- Determine recommended survey design strategies to maximize the quality of data collected via online crowdsourcing platforms for consumer research.
Course Suitability
This case is tailored for undergraduate or graduate-level marketing research design method courses including advanced marketing research, quantitative methods in marketing research, and experimental design in marketing, as well as other social science research courses like social science research or education research. It serves as supplementary material for discussions on collecting data for marketing or other social science research. Prior to engaging with this case, students should possess basic knowledge of the role of data in consumer research.
Recommended Reading
Aguinis H., Villamor I., & Ramani R.S. (2021). MTurk research: Review and recommendations. Journal of Management, 47(4), 823–837.
Beck, J. T., Rahinel, R., & Bleier, A. (2020). Company worth keeping: Personal control and preferences for brand leaders. Journal of Consumer Research, 46(5), 871–886.
Buhrmester, M. D., Talaifar, S., & Gosling, S. D. (2018). An evaluation of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, its rapid rise, and its effective use. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(2), 149–154.
Amazon Mechanical Turk (2019, April 12). Tutorial: Best practices for managing workers in follow-up surveys or longitudinal studies. Medium.
Goodman, J. K., & Paolacci, G. (2017). Crowdsourcing consumer research. Journal of Consumer Research, 44(1), 196–210.
Meyers, E. A., Walker, A. C., Fugelsang, J. A., & Koehler, D. J. (2020). Reducing the number of non-naïve participants in Mechanical Turk samples. Methods in Psychology, 3, 100032.
Peer, E., Brandimarte, L., Samat, S., & Acquisti, A. (2017). Beyond the Turk: Alternative platforms for crowdsourcing behavioral research. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 70, 153–163.
Read the Using Amazon Mechanical Turk for Consumer Behaviour Research case.
Request the instructor’s manual (IM) for this case [new tab].
Note that requesting faculty must be vetted before OATCJ can distribute this IM. The IM is copyrighted by its author and all rights are reserved. Case IMs are for teaching purposes and may not be shared or republished in any form.