Dear colleagues,
Below are the responses to my earlier request. Many thanks to all who shared their experience and questions!
Ariane
From Herman Aguinis
For a detailed discussion of various platforms (e.g., guru, elance, odesk, microworkers) as well as capabilities in terms of not only conducting surveys but also experimental studies, see the following article (available at http://mypage.iu.edu/~haguinis/pubs.html):
Aguinis, H., & Lawal, S. O. 2012. Conducting field experiments using eLancing's natural environment. Journal of Business Venturing, 27: 493-505.
From Diana Kwok
A list of sites which are similar to Crowdflower and MTurk:
eLance.com,
freelancer.com
guru.com
oDesk.com
microworkers.com
From Brian R. Spisak
I strongly recommend that you do not use crowdflower. They are having major problems with fraudulent respondents. In my specific case, someone got the payment code, generated new IP's, and skipped to the end of my survey about 60 times. Thus no useable data and drained funds. I then informed crowdflower about this problem and they were completely horrible in their response. I'm still trying to get refunded and it's been about 2 months.
From Joseph Carpini
I contacted CrowdFlower for details regarding their service and sent three follow-up emails over the past two months and have not heard a word back from them. As a consequence I lost confidence and have been searching for a viable alternative.
From Ante Glavas
I recently moved from the US back to Europe so I'm looking for platforms myself right now. I used to use MTurk and Qualtrics but don't have that here now. Fyi, we decided not to use Qualtrics because it was much more expensive than MTurk. I can't remember the actual cost of Qualtrics but on MTurk we gave $1 per survey + Amazon took 10%.
From Jacqueline Power
I was thinking of organizing a "Data Seekers PDW" in 2016. I was trying to get an idea about how many people might be interested.
De : Organizational Behavior Division Listserv [mailto:OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] De la part de Ollier Malaterre, Ariane
Envoyé : 16 juin 2015 10:56
À : OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Objet : [OB-LIST] International surveys: Have you used Crowdflower? Or else what?
Dear colleagues,
My co-authors and I are looking to collect data with employed individuals across a range of 25 to 30 countries, on a platform like MTurk. We came across Crowdflower, who boasts 5 million workers across 154 countries.
We would be grateful if anyone could share their experience with Crowdflower. Was it reliable? Were respondents employed individuals? To what extent were they representative of the countries' populations?
Suggestions about other platforms for international data collection would be great! If there is interest in the question I will compile a summary of responses and share it on the listserv.
Thank you very much,
Ariane
Ariane Ollier-Malaterre, PhD
School of Management
University of Quebec in Montréal (UQAM)
ollier.ariane@uqam.ca
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ariane_Ollier-Malaterre
Recipient of the 2014 R.M. Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research