Comparison of Survey Sources

The podcast episode discusses a research study comparing responses from Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and Prolific, two online survey platforms, to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. The study aimed to determine if the responses from MTurk and Prolific were representative of the general population. The findings revealed that both MTurk and Prolific samples were not as representative as the Pew sample. However, the representative sample from Prolific performed better than the others. Attention checks were used to filter out non-human responses, and text box attention checks proved to be more effective than other types. Overall, the study highlights the importance of understanding the limitations and demographic biases associated with online survey platforms.