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Using Online Pools

Lab manager, Mary Ross, is available to Johnson College of Business professors and PhD students to help facilitate studies using online subject pools including Amazon Mechanical Turk, Prolific Academic, and Qualtrics Panels. The lab can also help with bespoke research support for specialized panels, longitudinal studies, and programming challenges.

Request a Study

To request lab support in running an online study, email BSLAdmin@cornell.edu with your research needs. In order to make any purchases on the behalf of your research team, an approved Business Expense Request Tool (BERT) is required. Additionally, please include the following information in your study request email:

  • Title displayed to workers
  • Description: Optional one or two sentences describing what question types or material the participant may encounter in your survey.
  • Keywords (e.g. survey, decision-making, writing)
  • Worker payment
  • Target number
  • Expected time to complete
  • Study hyperlink
  • Qualifications or demographic filters
  • IRB approval or exemption number
  • Account to charge expenses
  • Timing: Date and time to launch
  • Available on mobile or tablet?
  • Survey completion: Each survey platform requires a different code generator to confirm study completion. Consult this link for MTurk, this link for TurkPrime, and this link for Prolific.

To get quality work, the lab recommends paying online participants close to the U.S. minimum wage, US $7.25 per hour. For a good benchmark, Prolific Academic endorses ‘ethical rewards’ and makes researchers pay at least US $6.50 per hour, or about 11 cents per minute. Better pay elicits better responses from better workers. If you’re asking workers to do something more advanced or laborious, like lots of reading and writing, consider paying more.