Dear all,

After my last couple posts, I got some questions about surveys especially
about the difficulties of reaching large yet solid samples.

Of course this is not a magic bullet, but among many other alternatives
Amazon's Mechanical Turk Service seems to be a very good alternative for
conducting large scale surveys and experiments in a rather inexpensive way.
Many serious social researchers has been using it, and identifying its
strengths and weaknesses. For example see:

https://psrc.princeton.edu/our-services/using-mturk


A very recent and solid article that uses a sample gathered from Mechanical
Turk:

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003122417749632

Abstract:

We develop and test a theory to address a puzzling pattern that has been
discussed widely since the 2016 U.S. presidential election and reproduced
here in a post-election survey: how can a constituency of voters find a
candidate “authentically appealing” (i.e., view him positively as
authentic) even though he is a “lying demagogue” (someone who deliberately
tells lies and appeals to non-normative private prejudices)? Key to the
theory are two points: (1) “common-knowledge” lies may be understood as
flagrant violations of the norm of truth-telling; and (2) when a political
system is suffering from a “crisis of legitimacy” (Lipset 1959) with
respect to at least one political constituency, members of that
constituency will be motivated to see a flagrant violator of established
norms as an authentic champion of its interests. Two online vignette
experiments on a simulated college election support our theory. These
results demonstrate that mere partisanship is insufficient to explain sharp
differences in how lying demagoguery is perceived, and that several
oft-discussed factors—information access, culture, language, and gender—are
not necessary for explaining such differences. Rather, for the lying
demagogue to have authentic appeal, it is sufficient that one side of a
social divide regards the political system as flawed or illegitimate.

For the record, American Sociological Review is one of the flagship
journals of US Sociology. I think Mechanical Turk and similar services have
a lot of potential for design research. I am hoping to try their services
in my future research.

Warm wishes,

ali o. ilhan


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