Evaluating SoJump.com as a tool for online behavioral research in China

Abstract

SoJump.com (wjx.cn; in short: SoJump) is a survey company that allows researchers to build and deploy inexpensive online surveys in China. Here we evaluate SoJump’s data quality and similarity to the national benchmark. In the first study, we compare SoJump’s performance in China to MTurk’s performance against national benchmarks in the United States and India. In the second study, we compare three Chinese platforms in two-wave panel studies. We conducted the panels on SoJump, Credamo (SoJump’s major competitor), and Cint (national benchmark). We included attention and comprehension checks, economic games, cognitive tasks, and a framing experiment. We find that SoJump’s sample is younger, better educated, more urban, higher-income, and more female than Cint, similar to MTurk in the U.S. and India. Compared to Credamo, SoJump is more similar to Cint both for data quality and behavior. We conclude that SoJump is appropriate to inexpensively access nationally diverse samples in China.