Eating disorder related research using Amazon Mechanical Turk (<scp>MTurk</scp>): Friend or foe?: Commentary on Burnette et al. (2021)

Vogel, Matthias; Krüger, Julia; Junne, Florian

doi:10.1002/eat.23675

“…As we did not control where, when and how participants filled in the vignette task and the questionnaires, they might have completed the study in a noisy and distracting environment. To reduce the risk that inattentive reading and incorrect answers would affect the validity of our data, we followed current guidelines for online research and included several check questions [59]. At the same time, the online setting potentially encouraged participants to disclose more personal information and to provide less socially desirable answers due to a greater level of anonymity and the possibility of completing the study in a comfortable environment [60].…”

Section: Limitations and Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Bad to Worse: Safety Behaviors Exacerbate Eating Disorder Fears

Spix

¹

,

Melles

²

,

Jansen

³

2023

Behavioral Sciences

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When evaluating ambiguous situations, humans sometimes use their behavior as a source of information (behavior-as-information effect) and interpret safety behaviors as evidence for danger. Accordingly, we hypothesized that eating disorder safety behaviors (restrictive eating, body checking, etc.) might aggravate fear and anxiety in individuals with an eating disorder. The present study tested to what extent eating disorder safety behaviors increase threat perception in individuals with and without an eating disorder. For this, 108 individuals with a self-reported eating disorder diagnosis and 82 healthy controls rated the dangerousness of several short situations. The situations systematically varied in the presence of eating disorder safety behaviors and danger information. As expected, all participants perceived situations in which the protagonist executed an eating disorder safety behavior as more threatening than situations without a safety behavior. This ‘behavior-as-information’ effect was equally strong in individuals with and without an eating disorder. Additionally, safety behaviors strengthened threat perception more in safe situations than in dangerous situations. To conclude, the presence of eating disorder safety behavior can increase threat perception regardless of whether individuals have an eating disorder or not. This makes eating disorder safety behaviors a potential risk factor for the development and maintenance of eating disorder fears.

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“…However, with the increasing use of web-based research and advances in technology, researchers continue to point to challenges in data integrity, particularly in quantitative data collection [4,[6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Known issues with fully web-based recruitment and data collection include data farming, bots, mischievous responders (responders who intentionally mislead researchers), low data quality when tasks are completed quickly, and bypassing IP address restrictions (which would allow a participant to complete a survey multiple times) [4,[6][7][8][9][10][11][12].…”

Section: Introduction and Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, with the increasing use of web-based research and advances in technology, researchers continue to point to challenges in data integrity, particularly in quantitative data collection [4,[6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Known issues with fully web-based recruitment and data collection include data farming, bots, mischievous responders (responders who intentionally mislead researchers), low data quality when tasks are completed quickly, and bypassing IP address restrictions (which would allow a participant to complete a survey multiple times) [4,[6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. To combat the challenges of web-based recruitment and quantitative data collection, researchers have aimed to describe best practices and protocols in survey development, implementation, and data cleaning to promote validity in web-based quantitative data collection [4,[6][7][8][9][10][11][12].…”

Section: Introduction and Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Methodological Challenges in Web-Based Qualitative Research With Medically Underserved Populations

Jackson¹,

Woo²,

Olson³

et al. 2023

J Med Internet Res

5

0

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Internet- or web-based research is rapidly increasing, offering multiple benefits for researchers. However, various challenges in web-based data collection have been illustrated in prior research, particularly since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. To add to the literature on best practices for web-based qualitative data collection, we present 4 case studies in which each research team experienced challenges unique to web-based qualitative research and had to modify their research approaches to preserve data quality or integrity. The first 2 case examples describe issues with using social media to recruit hard-to-reach populations, the third example demonstrates the challenge in engaging adolescents in sensitive conversations on the web, and the final example discusses both the issues in recruitment and the use of different modalities in collecting data to accommodate the medical needs of study participants. Based on these experiences, we provide guidance and future directions for journals and researchers in collecting qualitative data on the web.

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