Are there third party providers of Mechanical Turk psychology experiment services?

Question

For various reasons it can be difficult to run a Mechanical Turk experiment (i.e., you don't have the technical expertise, you don't reside in the United States, etc.)

Have any third-party providers arisen with the express purpose of managing the delivery of psychological experiments using Mechanical Turk?

Update: Ideally, I'd like to know not just about how to get around the United States restriction. I'm also interested in services which manage the process and are specifically set up with behavioural science experiments in mind or at least offer a suite of services, one of which is tailored to behaviour science experiments.

score 5 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:41

5

I would like to acknowledge the contributors to this post on stackoverflow.
Using Amazon MechanicalTurk if location != US?.

This question was posted a few years ago, but this answer is current.

Houdini is a third party platform for MTurk, designed for non US users.

This question also leads to Houdini enabling non-US based businesses accessing mTurk.

At this stage, I have not found other providers, let me know if you'd like me to investigate further.

I have provided a link of crowdsourcing services similar to mTurk.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:41

Community

1

answered Aug 29 '13 at 02:29

Houdini does not seem to be around anymore..their link is dead – Jonathan Jan 30 '15 at 15:25

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 30 '15 at 15:23

TurkPrime.com offers many features for using MTurk through a web interface. You can exclude and include workers, email them, restart survey and more. You can also create an account with SurveyComet.com if you do not reside in the US to find workers for surveys that you want to run. You can limit the workers by demographic which I have found to be extremely useful and cost effective.

I and my colleagues have used both sites for a while and just love them.

They also offer consulting services for custom software and survey design and analysis. — Jonathan, Jan 30 '15 at 19:08

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 30 '13 at 05:12

I found Cognilab. At time of posting they are in beta.

It appears to be specifically marketed at academic social and behavioural scientists.

They appear to aim to handle participant recruitment:

Crowdsource your research experiment using Amazon Mechanical Turk: Cognilab uses an online crowdsourcing marketplace to recruit from over 500,000 participants. Within days, hundreds of people will be completing your experiment.

But they also seem to encourage using their experimental interface:

Quickly create experiments using our drag-and-drop interface: Forget about complicated code or hiring programmers. Our drag and drop interface allows you to create academic-quality experiments within minutes and without having to write a single line of code!

Are there third party providers of Mechanical Turk psychology experiment services?

3 Answers3