SURVEYS WITHOUT A CODE
This may be old news for some of us turkers, but we have to keep in mind Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) is a digital labor platform with new workers being approved and included every day, thus it isn’t bad to share some of the knowledge we’ve had after working here for so many years.
Lately, I’ve been noticing there is an increase of surveys that when finished, don’t supply any type of code you can put on AMT, to let the researcher or requester know you have completed the task and to be compensated for your time and work.
Clearly, it makes us workers feel frustrated and that we lost our time, and even return the HITs out of fear of being rejected without a valid reason, report it for not having a code, or even blocking requesters for their lack of attention they put into their own surveys.
Obviously I can’t assure it is going to work 100% of the time, but if you enter your Mturk ID number in the survey code field or enter the survey message you received at the end and submit, oftentimes a follow email explaining your situation will clear a lot of these up.
And if there is a requester reading this, you could display some fixed code if respondents comply with your quality check criteria and if not you could display something like “Sorry you did not complete this survey sufficiently carefully” don’t just assume that not putting a code means workers would understand they didn’t pass your quality check.
I can’t assure you the reasons behind this, but most of the time it’s just an oversight on the requester’s side, after all, they’re humans and make mistakes too.