Recruiters for surveys?

[mmmmcake]

Hello,

 

I'm currently an undergrad studying the public's perception of recycled water. Would anyone know any services that would recruit survey participants for me, or sell me a database of people willing to participate? Ideally, I'd like a sample size of about 300-400 people from Atlanta, Georgia. So far, I only know about Knowledge Networks from my professor, and I'm not sure how reputable other services I've found on Google are.

 

Any help is appreciated

[fuzzylogician]

Maybe Amazon Mechanical Turk? You can restrict participation to just in the US, but I'm not sure if it's possible to restrict to a particular state. You could ask about the participants' location but that would get you lots of data you can't use.

[lewin]

MTurk is cheap but you can't restrict location more specifically than countries. Though there are ways around it: You could post a prequalifying task that asks people for their location for a few cents, then create a second task and invite only the people from Atlanta. They come from all over the U.S. though, so I suspect you'd need to prescreen thousands of people to get your Atlanta sample. Or, you could ask people to participate only if they live in Atlanta. This depends on their goodwill and you'd never know if people are deceiving you about their location.

 

I've used the survey panel from the company Toluna before. They're reputable and have a bit panel, but I suspect they'll cost more than you'll want to pay-- a representative U.S. sample is about $4/person and cost goes up as your requirements get more specific. I expect your sample would cost thousands of dollars (but quotes are free!).

 

Frankly, you're probably better of posting on craiglist and putting up posters around town, and doing a prize draw for participants.