Using Mechanical Turk in Study of Individual Innovation

Innovation is typically studied within businesses, but other sectors of the economy, such as governments and the household sector, can also undertake innovation activity. In order to fully understand innovation at the economy and society level, innovation must be understood beyond the business sector. However, there are numerous challenges to understanding non-business innovation. Individual innovation in particular is assumed to be relatively rare in the general population and thus expensive to measure using probability-based samples. At the same time, relatively few studies have examined individual innovation using non-probability samples. The lack of research on individual innovation leads to uncertainty about the best ways of asking questions related to individual innovation or which topics to prioritize if a probability-based sample is ever used to estimate individual innovation rates. In 2019, NCSES conducted a study of innovation at the individual level using Amazon Mechanical Turk ( MTurk ) for recruiting respondents and administrating the survey.

Source: NSF - Statistics on U.S. Science and Engineering Resources - March 31, 2022 Category: Statistics Source Type: news