Overview
The simple formula
We describe a general formula for
predicting the time it takes Workers to complete survey studies on MTurk. The average
Worker takes 10.3 seconds to answer a single question. This means that a study
with 60 questions should take approximately 10 minutes. At $6 per hour the
appropriate pay rate for a 60 question survey would be $1.
The
slightly more nuanced approach
We also show that increasing the pay rate
and decreasing the length of a survey can increase the average time that Workers
spend on each question by 36%. Pay rate and the number of questions in a HIT
both influence how long Workers spend answering questions. Workers spend less
time on each question for longer surveys and for surveys that pay less. Survey
length is also a moderator of the association between pay rate and the time
that Workers spend answering questions.
A more detailed
approach to predicting the length of a survey is depicted in Figure 1, which
takes both survey length and pay rate into consideration when predicting the time
it takes Workers to answer a single question. For longer surveys with 108
questions or above, time per question is closer to 8.3 seconds per question,
and is independent of pay rate. For medium length surveys with 65 questions, time
per survey can range between 9.2 seconds for a pay rate of $1.8 per hour, 10
seconds per question at $3.50 per hour, and 10.6 seconds for a pay rate of over
$5 per hour. Shorter surveys with 28 questions are answered at a rate of 10
seconds per question at $1.80 per hour, 11.5 seconds per question at $3.50 per
hour and over 13.2 seconds for pay rates of over $5 per hour. Overall, higher pay rates are most effective at increasing completion
time for shorter surveys.
This approach probably also generalizes to
non-MTurk online surveys and paper and pencil surveys, but more research should
be done to compare completion time across different platforms.
Why
determining completion time is important
Completion time refers to the time it
takes a Worker to complete a HIT. It is important for a Requester to correctly
estimate completion time so as to set the appropriate pay rate. This is often difficult to do accurately
however, and Requesters often end up over or underestimating completion time and,
consequently, pay rate. In a previous post we showed that lower pay rates are
associated with higher dropout. Thus, misestimating completion time, and not
setting an appropriate pay rate as a result, can have negative effects on data
quality.
Method
Determining
completion time for survey studies
To determine a general formula for
predicting study length we adopted the following strategy. We reviewed 30 MTurk
survey studies, counting the number of survey questions per survey and the average
time it took to complete each survey, across all Workers. We then calculated
the average time it takes for MTurk Workers to answer a single question, across
all studies. Future studies can use this average time estimate by simply
multiplying the number of questions in their study by the number of seconds it
takes to complete a question. We additionally examined various factors that may
influence how long Workers take to complete a question such as pay rate and the
number of questions in the survey.
Thirty 30 MTurk studies were reviewed to
examine how long Workers take to answer survey questions on average. The
studies had a total of 15, 392 Workers who answered a total of 570, 214 survey
questions. The surveys consisted of Likert items presented in a matrix (52.2%),
Likert items presented individually (33.1%), Yes/No questions (5.2%) and single
check box questions (9.5%).
Results
How
long do Workers take to answer a single survey question?
Workers take 10.3 seconds to answer a single
survey question on average, with a standard deviation of 3.8 seconds. The study
with the shortest average time to answer questions was 5.53 seconds, and for
the longest study Workers took 21.2 seconds to answer the average question.
Factors
that predict how long Workers spend on survey questions
Various factors were associated with how
long Workers take to answer questions (question
time). As described in a previous post, question time correlated with
dropout rate r (28) = .5, p = .01. Question time also correlated with total
number of questions in a survey (survey length), r (28) = -.5, p = .01, and pay
rate per hour, r (28) = .4, p = .04.
Pay rate per hour and survey length were used
as simultaneous predictors of question time in an OLS regression equation. The
results showed that 36% of the question time variance was accounted for by survey
length and pay rate, R2 = .363, F (2, 28) = 6.3, p. = .007.
Semi partial correlations for both pay rate
per hour (Beta = .71) and survey length (Beta = -.04) were both significant (p’s
< .05). This indicates that both variables significantly contribute to question
time, with the other variable controlled for (co-varied out of the regression equation).
In
the next analysis we examined whether the survey length moderates the
association between pay rate and question time. Moderation was computed
utilizing PROCESS, a mediation and moderation
software package (Hayes, 2012). The moderation analysis revealed that the
association between pay rate and question time was not significantly moderated
by survey length (R2 change due to the interaction = .0255, F (1, 26) = .88, p = .36.
The relationship between pay rate and question time was then
explored at different levels of the continuous survey length moderator using
the Johnson-Neyman bootstrapping technique (Hayes, 2012). The Johnson-Neyman bootstrapping
technique revealed that while pay rate does not significantly influence question
time for surveys that are longer than 108 questions, for surveys that are shorter pay rate is associated with significant increases in question
time. Figure 1, shows the slopes
(representing the association between pay rate and question time) at three different
levels of survey length. The three levels of survey length in Figure 1 correspond
to the average number of questions in a survey (65) and one standard deviation
above (108) and below (28) the average.
It is possible that the overall moderation by survey length was
not significant because the moderating effect of survey length may not be linear.
In the absence of an overall moderation effect, the Johnson-Neyman analysis,
which probes the interaction across the range of the continuous moderator, suggests
that higher pay rate is associated with an increased time that Workers spend
per question, particularly for surveys that are shorter than 42 questions.
Interpretation
The results of this study show that Amazon
Turk Workers take an average of 10.3 seconds to answer a question for an
average survey of 65 questions at a pay rate of $3.50 per hour. However, question time can vary depending on two factors: 1) how much a study pays, and
2) how many questions a study has. These factors independently contribute to
the time that Workers take to answer questions, and they also interact with
each other.
The results suggest that higher pay rates
can be effective at increasing question time, but that this effect does not generalize to overly long surveys. We did not find evidence that question time increases per pay rate. In other words, Workers spend less time per question for long surveys independent of pay rate. However,
it may be that pay rates may influence question time even for very long
surveys, if the pay rate is higher than those that were utilized in the studies
reviewed here. Future studies should explore these issues in more detail.
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