Hello, My name is Sarah Vannier and I am a Ph.D. student at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. My lab has recently started using mturk to recruit participants for surveys. So far it has been a good experience on our end and I hope everyone who has completed the survey has found it interesting. I have a question that I am hoping someone can help me with. The standard practice for research survey HITs seems to be to include a link to an external survey. In theory a worker can accept the HIT and then go to the link. Once they complete the survey they receive a 4-digit code. They enter this on the HIT page and then the work is considered done. As a backup we are also asking workers to enter their mturk ID in the actual survey. I can then double check the mturk IDs in the survey and the workers that completed the HIT (aka: entered the 4-digit code) and approve their work. My problem is that I have had about 10 people who complete their survey, but are not listed as workers. I assume that they either did not accept the HIT (can workers see the link before accepting the HIT?) or never returned to mturk to enter the 4-digit code. All of these people completed the survey in full, which probably took them about 20 minutes, so I would really like to compensate them if possible. I do have their worker IDs. Is there a way to search for them or send them a message? Thanks in advance for any advice/information you have!
I think you can send them a message through Mturk if you have their worker ID. or you can create a hit for them and put their number in the hit title, something like...this survey is specifically for xxxxx.
My guess is that they accepted the HIT and completed the survey, but possibly missed the survey code and decided to return the HIT to not risk a rejection. If you would like to compensate them for the work, you can send a bonus to the worker by using this link: https://requester.mturk.com/workers/ Just input the worker ID in the URL like this: https://requester.mturk.com/workers/AHPOXX7GFXXXXX Good Luck
Hi Sarah, it sounds like you have a sense of fairness that workers love to see. I have done exactly what you're seeing with a survey before - once because the timer ran out, and I didn't know how to get a message to the requester, once because I forgot to accept the hit, once because I was interested in doing the survey but didn't want to risk a rejection with a new requester with no TO (reputation). Another reason someone might do it is to be able to answer nonsense answers and not risk a rejection - I really don't know of anyone like that, as the vast majority of workers are actually pretty responsible, but I thought I'd mention it in case you want to review their data for irregularities or exclude them from your research. There is a way to set up a HIT so that the screen workers see before accepting doesn't include the link. However that can be frustrating to some workers, who want to know if they qualify for a survey before accepting (so that they can avoid having to return the hit). It's still common, so it would be one way to prevent workers from seeing the link before accepting, if that's what you want. To answer your question about contacting them, I'm not actually sure! One thing you can try is a link like this: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/contact?subject=X&requesterId=Y&requesterName=Z (You might need to expand the link if the forum abbreviates it). Then fill in a subject in place of X, the worker ID in place of Y, and a name in place of Z. I don't actually know if that will work, but that's how workers can contact requesters if they know their requester ID, and I think I remember someone saying that if you were both a worker and a requester, it was the same ID number. I hope someone else is able to help with that part. But I wouldn't worry too much about it if you can't find a way to contact them - they were aware of taking the survey, and for whatever reason didn't submit the hit. Just be on the lookout for one of them to contact you about it Then you can set up a dummy hit (pay $0) and send them the compensation as a bonus.
Thanks everyone for the information and suggestions. I can't seem to find a way to message workers that haven't completed work for us. I think I will just take jrknoch's advice and wait to see if they contact me. I will also update our post and survey to make it clearer that wrokers need to return to mturk to enter the code so they can be compensated. Thanks again for the info! Really appreciated!
If a worker does not have the wherewithal to properly complete the HIT, then they are the authors of their own misfortune.