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.

Google Forms Integration with TurkPrime

Google Forms can be used to deliver a study with TurkPrime in a similar manner to other survey platforms (like Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey).

In Google Forms set up your survey and then set up the secret completion code display:
1. Click on Settings (the gear icon)
2. Click on Presentation
2. Change the confirmation message to include "Your secret completion code is ABCDEF". (Of course, replace ABCDEF with your own code)

Then get the Google Form link 
1. Click on SEND
2. Click on the Chain / Link Icon
3. Click Copy (or just copy the URL)

On TurkPrime you can then select your panel if desired, add the  Google Forms survey  link URL and in the Tab (How workers are paid) enter the fixed secret completion code.  (e.g. ABCDEF)  

New Safety Feature: Assignment Rejections are not Automated and Require Manual User Action

Many researchers set up their studies to use the TurkPrime AutoApprove feature so that they do not need to manually approve worker assignments based on the secret code that workers enter. On occasion, a researcher may set up his study incorrectly which results in many worker assignments getting automatically rejected. This was a significant cause for distress among the Mechanical Turk workers who received rejections for their work which then went unpaid and also lowered their MTurk approval rating.  This was also a sore point for TurkPrime researchers who had to deal with upset workers and correspond with them, and often reverse their rejections

To alleviate this issue, TurkPrime will give researchers greater control of the rejection process when AutoApprove is used: 

Only worker assignments that have the correct secret codes will be auto-approved while workers with invalid secret codes will require manual rejection. (If a rejection is made in error by a researcher, it may still be reversed.) This manual rejection is made using the same interface as is available for non-AutoApproved workers as shown below.

Researchers will see the secret codes the workers entered and whether they were correct. they will then have the option to approve, reject or leave their status undecided.

The manual rejection process must be completed within the Amazon Approval window (default of 7 days). Otherwise, Mechanical Turk will automatically approve the pending assignments that were not resolved buy that time.