Who Works for Mturk and Why - Part II

In my introductory article on who works at Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) and why, I just brushed the surface of this topic talking about where Mturk workers live and some basic rationales for why some of these folks work on Mturk along with talking about the gender distribution for Mturk workers.

With this article, I’ll go more into depth and discuss the age distribution of works, their educational levels and income levels. If the data provides this info, I’m going to focus on U.S.-based work data.

Age Distribution
Not surprisingly, there are a lot of 20 and 30 somethings work on Mturk. Roughly about 40% of Mturk workers hit this range. These folks are in that age range that are computer savvy and might be in a position where they need some extra income.

BTW: About 4% of the folks on Mturk are 60 plus.

Educational Levels
There is somewhat surprising data here. The vast majority of Mturk workers have college degrees. Over 30% of workers report having a bachelor’s degree with around 12% having a Master’s degree. Those having some college, but no degrees came in at around 25%.

My gut would have told me that most of the workers would not have degrees, but obviously my gut can’t deny the hard data.

Income Level
Remember, I’m focusing on U.S. worker numbers here. Still I found it somewhat surprising that the two largest income ranges reporting that they work for Mturk are $25K to $40K and $50K to $60K. My suspicion would have been that lower income folks would be doing this work, but maybe they are busy making a better hourly wage. My other thought would be that workers in the two most prolific income ranges could be a tell about how tight the U.S. economy is during these recessionary times.

Look for Part III of this series when I discuss the marital status and the time spent working for Mturk.