Crowdsourcing Quality Concerns: An Examination of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

The use of crowdsourcing platforms, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), have been an effective and frequent tool for researchers to gather data from participants for a study. It provides a fast, efficient, and cost-effective method for acquiring large amounts of data for a variety of research projects, such as surveys that may be conducted to assess the use of information technology or to better understand cybersecurity perceptions and behaviors. While the use of such crowdsourcing platforms has gained both popularity and acceptance over the past several years, quality concerns remain a significant issue for the researcher. This paper examines these issues.