News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:How Not to Explain Success by throwawayrol on Sunday May 29, 2016 @10:45PM (#11799286)
Yes. Even and especially surveys where the participants are not only compensated for their time, but are also selected from a pool of people who are specifically seeking out such piece-male work (a la Amazon Turk).

There's a big difference b/w posting flyers/ads in target-rich environments and providing a low friction way for people to get involved in the study. But if you do something on Amazon Turk you're basically guaranteeing a very particular type of person, because random guy with a high paying job probably isn't going to have a turk account and won't have the patience to create one just for your survey.

In some cases you can make a good case that this doesn't totally invalidate any sort of generality in the results, but for the most part I throw out papers -- on face -- that proceed in this ways without extended, evidence-based discussion of why the hell I can expect any sort of conclusion except "our result generalizes to a population of people who really need an extra dollar or two (literally) and are looking for pretty much any way to get it."

There are no comments on this comment yet.