Duplicate respondents across related experiments are a substantial problem for conducting programmatic research on AMT (Chandler, Mueller, & Paolacci). In the tutorial linked below, we provide a straightforward alternative that allows researchers who use Qualtrics to exclude workers who participated in a previous study. This approach allows researchers to exclude workers who have completed any HIT before, without having to use AMT’s Command Line Tools.
We conducted a test HIT with 100 AMT workers who were asked to follow a link to Qualtrics that was posted using the script in the tutorial. In terms of browser, there were Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Opera users. In terms of operating system, there were Windows users, Mac users, and Linux users, with various versions. Nobody reported seeing any error message and all proceeded to the survey. All of the Worker IDs recorded on Qualtrics matched the results of the HIT, therefore the code seems to be stable and reliable. However, the tutorial is subject to improvements. Should you find any bug or have suggestions, please contact the authors or better comment on this post. The tutorial was updated on May 2, 2012. Further tutorials will follow, and you will find an updated list in the Resources section.
Screening participants from previous studies on Amazon Mechanical Turk and Qualtrics
Eyal Peer (Carnegie Mellon University), epeer@andrew.cmu.edu
Gabriele Paolacci (Erasmus University)
Jesse Chandler (Princeton University)
Pam Mueller (Princeton University)
You can also download a sample .qsf file that you can import on your Qualtrics account.
