Validating the demographic, political, psychological, and experimental results obtained from a new source of online survey respondents

Researchers have increasingly turned to online convenience samples as sources of survey responses that are easy and inexpensive to collect. As reliance on these sources has grown, so too have concerns about the use of convenience samples in general and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in particular. We distinguish between “external validity” and theoretical relevance, with the latter being the more important justification for any data collection...