Food for thought: Commentary on Burnette et al. (2021) “Concerns and recommendations for using Amazon MTurk for eating disorder research”

Abstract

Burnette et al. aimed to validate two eating disorder symptom measures among transgender adults recruited from Mechanical Turk (MTurk). After identifying several data quality issues, Burnette et al. abandoned this aim and instead documented the issues they faced (e.g., demographic misrepresentation, repeat submissions, inconsistent responses across similar questions, failed attention checks). Consequently, Burnette et al. raised concerns about the use of MTurk for psychological research, particularly in an eating disorder context. However, we believe these claims are overstated because they arise from a single study not designed to test MTurk data quality. Further, despite claiming to go “ab..