Institutional Review Board for Mechanical Turk

[wajdi zaghouani]

I was wondering if there is a need for an IRB (Institutional Review
Board) in the case of Amazon Turk work since it is a kind of an
experiement involving human subjects ?

I found this interesting article :

http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2009/01/mechanical-turk-human-subjects-and-irbs.html

Any hints, experience on how you have dealt with this issue is
welcome.

Wajdi

[Chris Callison-Burch]

I got an exemption from the Institutional Review Board at Johns
Hopkins under Category 2 (Research involving the use of educational
tests (cognitive, diagnostic, aptitude, achievement), survey
procedures, interview procedures or observations of public behavior).
I'll attach my application and our IRB's approval letter to my next
message in case they are useful for other NLP researchers who want to
apply for an IRB exemption for their Mechanical Turk tasks.

Chris Callison-Burch

On Feb 25, 1:24 pm, wajdi zaghouani <waj...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I was wondering if there is a need for an IRB (Institutional Review
> Board) in the case of Amazon Turk work since it is a kind of an
> experiement involving human subjects ?
>
> I found this interesting article :
>

> http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2009/01/mechanical-turk-hu...

[Chris Callison-Burch]

A scan of my application is attached, along with our IRB's acceptance letter. --CCB

[Nitin Madnani]

Good to hear! Was my IRB app at all useful to you?

- Nitin

> --
> To unsubscribe, reply using "remove me" as the subject.
>

[Chris Callison-Burch]

Yes, thanks for the example, Nitin. :-)

I thought that everyone else in the NAACL Workshop might benefit from seeing a full application, in case they have to go through the process themselves.

--Chris

[Nitin Madnani]

I agree. Thanks for sharing. Hopefully this will help avoid any
barriers to the adoption of MTurk for research in university settings.

- Nitin