Verified US Region Targeting

Verified US State and Region Targeting

Problem: Many researchers wish to target participants from specific states or US regions of the United States like from the Northeast or the West. The issue that they often encounter is that using the MTurk Geographic Qualification specifying the US state is often not adequate to ensure that the participants reside in the specified state. 

The MTurk state may be incorrect since workers move since setting up their MTurk account and it has been reported that MTurk uses the worker bank location as the worker's state which may have never been the state of the worker's residency. TurkPrime internal quality tests have shown that up to 25% of the worker reported states using the  MTurk Geographic Qualification are inconsistent with the worker's state as reported by their IP address.

Solution: The TurkPrime Pro feature to verify location by Ip address and the US Region selector will only qualify workers whose IP address has been verified as being located in the study's required state or US region. All other workers will be disqualified from taking the study.

In addition, to run regionally targeted studies, TurkPrime now includes a region selector which automatically includes IP state verification to endure quality results.

Block Multiple Responses from the Same IP Address

Block Duplicate IP Addresses

Our most popular feature request has been to allow the blocking of multiple responses from the same IP address.

MTurk workers with different MTurk Worker IDs may share an IP address. This might be for a number of reasons:

1. Different workers may be using the same Internet connection. For example, they may both be in the same apartment, school or Starbucks and access MTurk over the same WiFi connection. 
   
   Some researchers will want to avoid this so that their sample is more diverse and representative of the population they are targeting.
2. One worker takes HITs using different MTurk accounts. Nearly all researchers will want to avoid this.

When this option is selected a worker who has the same IP address as a previous workers who accepted the study will see a message that he/she is ineligible for the HIT. 

If the worker, nevertheless, accept the HIT, they will not see the hyperlink to the study. Instead they will see a message to return the HIT because another worker at that IP address has taken the HIT