In this post, I share simple techniques to filter participants before they take part in your online experiment. These techniques filter bots and participants using automated scripts plus participants who fake their geolocation using VPN/VPS, proxies, and server farms.
The COVID pandemic has increased the popularity of online experiments in the field of accounting, but, at the same time, our criticism of online participants has been mounting up rapidly. Does this mean online experiments are rubbish or are we perhaps a little too harsh?
Experiments that recruit from online participants pools such as MTurk and Prolific have become increasingly popular over the past two decades. However, since scholars have referred to such experiments as both laboratory and field experiments, which classification should we use?
Choosing the right participant pool for your experiment is challenging. Which experiments require professional participants? Does it matter whether you recruit students or online participants? In this post, Jeremy Bentley explains his approach to participant pool selection.