ABSTRACT

Objective

Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a popular data collection tool that is increasingly used to study parents and children. We examined the quality of data obtained via MTurk, the representativeness of parents on MTurk, and whether the wording of MTurk recruitment materials is related to sample characteristics.

Method

Participants were 650 parents with children aged 4 to 17 recruited for two separate studies (64.6% female, 83.8% Caucasian, mean age = 37.6 years). The Mental Health Survey (N = 322) recruitment materials described a study about mental health and the Health Survey (N = 328) materials only referenced health; both surveys restricted participation to parents in the United States (U.S.). Parents completed measures about demographics, mental health service seeking history, and parent and youth psychopathology.

Results

Participants provided reliable responses on study measures, with low rates of missing data. Participants were more female, less racially/ethnically diverse, and more educated than the U.S. population, and also had more children per household. Over 40% of parents and 30% of children had previously received mental health services and many scored in the clinical range on measures of psychopathology. Contrary to hypotheses, mental health help seeking was higher in the Health Survey than the Mental Health survey.

Conclusions

MTurk is a feasible method for child and adolescent clinical psychology research, although participants may not be fully demographically representative of the general population and could possibly be better considered an at-risk or clinical sample than a community sample.

中文翻译：

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使用 Mechanical Turk 研究父母和孩子：数据质量和代表性的检验

摘要

客观的

Mechanical Turk (MTurk) 是一种流行的数据收集工具，越来越多地用于研究父母和儿童。我们检查了通过 MTurk 获得的数据的质量、父母在 MTurk 上的代表性以及 MTurk 招聘材料的措辞是否与样本特征相关。

方法

参与者是 650 名父母，他们的孩子年龄在 4 至 17 岁之间，被招募进行两项独立的研究（64.6% 为女性，83.8% 为高加索人，平均年龄 = 37.6 岁）。心理健康调查 (N = 322) 招募材料描述了一项关于心理健康的研究，而健康调查 (N = 328) 材料仅提及健康；这两项调查都将参与限制在美国（美国）的父母身上。父母完成了关于人口统计、心理健康服务寻求历史以及父母和青少年精神病理学的测量。

结果

参与者对研究措施提供了可靠的回应，缺失数据的比率很低。与美国人口相比，参与者的女性更多，种族/民族多样性更少，受教育程度更高，每户家庭的孩子也更多。超过 40% 的父母和 30% 的儿童以前接受过心理健康服务，其中许多人在精神病理学测量的临床范围内得分。与假设相反，健康调查中寻求心理健康帮助的人数高于心理健康调查。

结论

MTurk 是儿童和青少年临床心理学研究的一种可行方法，尽管参与者可能在人口统计学上不能完全代表一般人群，并且可能比社区样本更好地被视为有风险或临床样本。