Title

Crowdsourcing and personality measurement equivalence: A warning about countries whose primary language is not English

Authors

Authors

J. Feitosa; D. L. Joseph;D. A. Newman

Comments

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Abbreviated Journal Title

Pers. Individ. Differ.

Keywords

Crowdsourcing; Measurement; Data collection techniques; Survey methods; Invariance testing; ITEM RESPONSE THEORY; MEASUREMENT INVARIANCE; MECHANICAL TURK; FIT; INDEXES; CULTURES; METHODOLOGIES; TESTS; Psychology, Social

Abstract

In the search to find cheaper, faster approaches for data collection, crowdsourcing methods (i.e., online labor portals that allow independent workers to complete surveys for compensation) have risen in popularity as a tool for personality researchers, despite a lack of evidence regarding the equivalence of crowdsourcing with traditional data collection methods. The purpose of this study was to evaluate crowdsourcing as a data collection tool by examining the measurement equivalence of crowdsourced data (i.e., from Amazon.com's MTurk) with more traditional samples (i.e., an undergraduate sample and a sample of organizational employees). Our results (using a popular measure of Big Five personality) provided evidence of measurement equivalence across all three samples, with one important exception: crowdsourced data (from MTurk) only exhibited measurement invariance with traditional data collection methods when responses were restricted to participants from native-English speaking countries. Although MTurk appears to be an easy, cost-effective data collection tool, our results suggest that MTurk data are similar to traditionally-collected data only when the MTurk sample is restricted to IP addresses from English-speaking countries. (c) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Journal Title

Personality and Individual Differences

Volume

75

Publication Date

1-1-2015

Document Type

Article

Language

English

First Page

47

Last Page

52

WOS Identifier

WOS:000348270900009

ISSN

0191-8869

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