MTurkR (version 0.8.0)

ContactWorker: Contact Worker(s)

Description

Contact one or more workers. This sends an email with specified subject line and body text to one or more workers. This can be used to recontact workers in panel/longitudinal research or to send follow-up work. Most likely will need to be used in tandem with GrantBonus to implement panels.

Usage

ContactWorker(subjects, msgs, workers, batch = FALSE, 
              verbose = getOption('MTurkR.verbose', TRUE), ...)

Arguments

subjects

A character string containing subject line of an email, or a vector of character strings of of length equal to the number of workers to be contacted containing the subject line of the email for each worker. Maximum of 200 characters.

msgs

A character string containing body text of an email, or a vector of character strings of of length equal to the number of workers to be contacted containing the body text of the email for each worker. Maximum of 4096 characters. Newlines can be specified with \n and tabs can be specified with \t in the message body.

workers

A character string containing a WorkerId, or a vector of character strings containing multiple WorkerIds.

batch

A logical (default is FALSE), indicating whether workers should be contacted in batches of 100 (the maximum allowed by the API). This significantly reduces the time required to contact workers, but eliminates the ability to send customized messages to each worker.

verbose

Optionally print the results of the API request to the standard output. Default is taken from getOption('MTurkR.verbose', TRUE).

...

Additional arguments passed to request.

Value

A data frame containing the list of workers, subjects, and messages, and whether the request to contact each of them was valid.

Details

Send an email to one or more workers, either with a common subject and body text or subject and body customized for each worker.

In batch mode (when batch=TRUE), workers are contacted in batches of 100 with a single identical email. If one email fails (e.g., for one worker) the other emails should be sent successfully. That is to say, the request as a whole will be valid but will return additional information about which workers were not contacted. This information can be found in the MTurkR log file and viewing the XML responses directly.

Note: It is only possible to contact workers who have performed work for you previously. When attempting to contact a worker who has not worked for you before, this function will indicate that the request was successful even though the email is not sent. The function will return a value of “HardFailure” for Valid when this occurs. The printed results may therefore appear contradictory because MTurk reports that requests to contact these workers are Valid, but they are not actually contacted. In batch, this means that a batch will be valid but individual ineligible workers will be reported as not contacted.

ContactWorkers() and contact() are aliases.

References

API Reference

Examples

# NOT RUN {
a <- "Complete a follow-up survey for $.50"
b <- "Thanks for completing my HIT!
I will pay a $.50 bonus if you complete a follow-up survey by Friday at 5:00pm.
The survey can be completed at
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/pssurvey?c=A1RO9UEXAMPLE."

# contact one worker
c1 <- "A1RO9UEXAMPLE"
d <- ContactWorker(subjects = a,
                   msgs = b,
                   workers = c1)

# contact multiple workers in batch
c2 <- c("A1RO9EXAMPLE1","A1RO9EXAMPLE2","A1RO9EXAMPLE3")
e <- ContactWorker(subjects = a,
                   msgs = b,
                   workers = c2,
                   batch = TRUE)
# }