Ideas for recruiting groups of friends?

Hi everyone,

I have a task that needs to be completed by a group of people who already know each other. We're looking at problem-solving in groups, and it's important that the group members are already acquainted. We need groups of 5-10 Turkers who know each other either personally (e.g. through work or school) or virtually (e.g. through interactions on forums like TurkerView).

What do you all think is the best way to recruit groups for this kind of HIT? I was thinking one way would be ask folks here on TurkerView to contact me if they'd like to sign up as a group "leader," and then to have the group leader start a private email or discussion thread where we could coordinate a time for the leader and 4-9 of his or her friends to complete the HIT together. I would then create a custom HIT for the leader and his or her groupmates, and assign them custom credentials so only they could view their group's HIT in the MTurk platform. (All of our HITs are served directly into the MTurk interface, so there is no need to open a separate website, enter any custom codes or contact information, or any of those inconveniences.)

I appreciate any suggestions or advice. Thanks!

Kariyushi
PhD Candidate
The University of Chicago Booth School of Business
(Kariyushi.Rao@ChicagoBooth.edu)

 

hmmm @ChrisTurk - sounds like a question for you

 

As long as you can clearly define the first point you can absolutely find some groups in the MTurk sphere. I can think of at least 4-5 sub groups of very close knit Turkers who are still retrievable from here. It's a bit of the nature of the work that as workers collect here they eventually tend to group up together in smaller social cliques & go their own way since smaller work groups represent a more ideal balance of social/work. If you're talking about a "general first name basis" type of virtual relationship a lot of folks tend to branch off into shared interests/topics too but that would probably be straining the definition of "acquainted" lol - kind of a hard to define concept online I guess.

How many groups are you needing total? Is some population crossover acceptable (ie Turker A being a part of group C & D)? Any idea on the pay range / duration / etc (the nitty-gritty details lol) - I'll reach out to some groups that don't frequent as much if you can throw me the details to FWD along. For the most part with intimately familiar groups on MTurk you're generally going to be dealing with the top end echelon of workers who do this "professionally" - so that impacts both the wages they'd expect (I know you're always great about this but it's worth specifically mentioning in this case) and the type of participant you'll get (naivity is probably not an option lol).

I've never met a family group larger than 3 who MTurks, not to say they don't exist & hopefully saying this someone will correct me w/ personal experience .

I can think of maybe one group of 3-4 real-life friends who all have MTurk accounts but I'd be surprised if they were all still active, so real-life interactions are going to be really difficult to get a hold of (maybe reach out to TP about Prime Panels if a real-life network is required?) & I'd be skeptical about recruiting them from MTurk.

 

This sounds almost exactly like the old huddler groups that stanford used to run. @ChrisTurk prob should have just mentioned that and it worked well for them.

 

Except those didn't require a pre-existing connection between the workers. Sure sometimes you got matched w/ people you knew, but it wasn't the core foundation of the groups, and plenty of folks got boned w/ randos because I remember being one of them and that suuuuucked

Unless I misunderstood her post she needs workers who are already familiar with each other.

 

I said almost.

They had the worker pool to make it with just people we knew already but just chose to randomize it. If you pay enough you can do the same thing that they did and have plenty of people that know each other grouping up.

I found that the huddler stuff went pretty well if I was the leader but otherwise it was hit or miss.

 

I didn't think about those that did work well

 

Prob because your leader sucked. This wasn't a problem when I was a leader.

Either way there are plenty of off shoot groups that people are in and if Kariyushi is paying well enough they will be more than willing to do the work.

 

Only if you accept "has seen this avatar somewhere on the Internet before" as good enough criteria for a group sometimes

I'd be willing to bet the 'super sekrit discord club' would work together a heck of a lot differently (probably more efficiently after they murdered you as group leader) than if you just chucked 6 random people from TV together even if they were all prolific posters.

But yea, you're right I'd imagine a group of like @leafs4_cup @jessers @dan @angel @NBadger & idk pick 2-3 other long timers would operate together wildly differently than just RNG'ing 6-8 other humans on the platform.

Just a matter of defining where the line is.

Actually I guess on that note @jessers does have a whole group of "real life" turk friends if she lets all those folks who went to visit her out of the dungeon

 

Meme Panda leadership 2020

 

I just pray the leader has the option of taking all of the group's payment for themselves. That's a study I'd absolutely read

 

i can surely release my collection in the name of rea--oh wait what thread is this?

this feels like being picked first in gym class, lol. ok joking aside, yeah, i second that. the differences between the many types of groups would vary wildly so that definition would be the first step.

like angel said, those stanford things worked well, but it worked especially well when it was a group of people on the same page of things turk-wise. there are people who get along as friends, but butt heads as workers, and vice versa. so, the variables being what "type" of friendships you're looking for, and what type of workers you're looking for. like, do you want to recruit people who talk 24/7/365, or people who just tangentially know each other (like a teacher picking random groups for a group project). then do you want to recruit friends/acquaintances who are like-minded for work, or maybe the same groups but all work differently, etc.

 

definitely this, lol

do you want people that are close enough to fight a little bit, because that's part of it, or do you want people that are close enough to work well together, because you want the best possible result?