In mTurk, how can I use participation in a previous HIT (or series of HITs) as a qualification?

Question

I am using mTurk for surveys, and I need a way of making sure that people who have participated in a previous survey / HIT do not participate in certain future surveys / HITs. I am not sure whether I should do this as a qualification or in some other way.

I know there is some way to do this, but I have no idea how. I have very limited programming experience and would greatly, greatly appreciate specific instructions on how I might do this. My understanding is that I might need to use AWS? Many thanks!

Answer 1

Here's a hacky way to do it:

• When you accept HITs for surveys, save every participating worker's ID.
• In the writeup, note that "if you've done previous surveys w/ us, then you can't do this one (IE, you can, but we won't approve it)".
• When you approve HITs, cross-reference the worker ids with anybody who participated in a previous survey, and reject the hits of any that match.

If you're doing enough surveys, then yes, you probably want to use AWS API for at least the approval part. otherwise, most things appear to be do-able from the requester interface.