I am an academic researcher and will be using MTurk for an experiment survey. The survey requires listening to one 20sec audio and answering 20 short questions about the perception of the listener. What is a fair price to pay for this survey? I have limited funding, but at the same time I don't want to pay people less and take advantage of them.
Fair payment
- Thread starter RozH
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I'm not a requester, so it almost feels wrong for me to say or speculate anything, but my guess is that, in terms of data that would be suitably accurate for academic research, you very likely get what you pay for on MTurk. For me personally, I won't consider taking a survey if it's not worth my time, and I therefore look for hits that pay at least $0.10 per minute minimum ($6/hour), and I imagine many others look for rates higher than that. Anything lower than that, and you might find that people who are actually willing to take your survey are rushing through it as quickly as possible in order to maximize profit, and could end up not giving you their best data.
I understand! I registered myself as a Turker to get on the other side of the equation as well. I would definitely pay more than 0.10/min. However, what is the $ amount at which the 'law of diminishing returns' kick in? For example, as a Turker, I am wary of surveys that pay $2.00 even if they advertise as "5 question survey" because I have been suckered into surveys that require long reading passages and answering questions that are worded so weirdly, my brain hurts trying to decipher the meaning in a short time. Anyway, all input is welcome because this is my first time as a requester as well as a Turker.
Yeah, you definitely don't want to sucker people into a complicated survey; you'll get a lot of people who will likely quit partway in, and those who finish will express their distaste through negative Turkopticon/Turkerview ratings and such. If you're browsing through other hits, definitely pay attention to Turkopticon and Turkerview ratings to get a sense of what people consider "low paying". Best of luck with your survey.I understand! I registered myself as a Turker to get on the other side of the equation as well. I would definitely pay more than 0.10/min. However, what is the $ amount at which the 'law of diminishing returns' kick in? For example, as a Turker, I am wary of surveys that pay $2.00 even if they advertise as "5 question survey" because I have been suckered into surveys that require long reading passages and answering questions that are worded so weirdly, my brain hurts trying to decipher the meaning in a short time. Anyway, all input is welcome because this is my first time as a requester as well as a Turker.
craig1954
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I agree. Realistically, you need x number of responces and have y amount of money. Simple math will tell you what the max you are able to pay, without bonuses. Every requester's situation is different and how a HIT is set up can be dramatically varied. If everyone put as much thought into this as you then our work would be so much easier.
In my experience, I've found that under-paying for a task can have negative impact with your task as people have less incentive to work on it. My best advice would be to try it a few times and measure how long it takes to complete. On my tasks, I log the average time taken and then scale the price of the HIT to target a specific hourly pay rate.