Excerpt
SUMMARY: An online job forum called Mechanical Turk has created a pool of professional survey-takers who complete hundreds of inquiries a week. For academic researchers, it’s cheap, easy to use and the response flood in fast. But how good is the data being collected? Judy Woodruff learns more from the NewsHour’s Jenny Marder.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): A look at enterprise reporting we have done online that we thought would be of interest to you.
It’s about the proliferation of scientific and academic research being done online and whether those methods may be leading to flawed or unreliable data. Much of the work was done once by students, but, these days, there is an informal work force of people who participate in studies through an online job forum known as Mechanical Turk.
The name was inspired which an 18th century fake chess-playing robot decorated in Turkish robes. It defeated almost every opponent it faced for years, but it turned out there was a hidden human chess master behind the machine.
Well, the NewsHour’s Jenny Marder reported our story. And she fills us in now.
Jenny, it’s great to have you here to talk about it.
So, first of all, tell us more about who these people are who are answering these surveys and what exactly do they do.
JENNY MARDER: Yes.
Well, this is a portion of the 500,000 workers on Mechanical Turk that we were looking at. And the workers do all sorts of jobs. The jobs have been — work has been called microlabor because the pay is often very, very low. You see a lot of jobs for 25 cents, 5 cents, even a penny.
So they’re really working for pennies on Mechanical Turk. The reason we got interested is it’s been, over the past five years, increasingly used by academic researchers as a way of getting data and finding study subjects for their research.
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