Qualification Requests

This tutorial walks through how requesters can manage Qualification Requests, which emerge when a requester creates a "requestable" QualificationType and one or more workers request to be granted that Qualification.

When a requester creates a QualificationType, that QualificationType is added to the public list of Qualifications that workers can earn. All QualificationTypes are publicly visible to all workers and to other requesters. For example, the Qualifications tab on the worker site lists all Qualifications. As of December, 2014, this includes over 30,000 QualificationTypes.

(Note: These QualificationTypes can also be viewed in MTurkR using SearchQualificationsTypes(only.mine = FALSE, return.all = TRUE).)

QualificationTypes vary by whether they are "requestable" and what, if any, Qualification Test the worker must complete before they can be granted the Qualification:

1. Some are "requestable," meaning that a worker can ask to be given the Qualification without completing a Qualification Test but must wait for the request to manually grant the Qualification
2. Some are requestable but auto-granted, meaning that the worker simply needs to request the Qualification and, upon request, is automatically granted the Qualification
3. Some are requestable but involve a Qualification Test, meaning the worker can complete a short Test to qualify but must await manual approval from the requester before earning the Qualification
4. Some are requestable and involve an automatically scored Qualification Test. In these cases, the Qualification Test appears the same as in (3), but the requester has supplied an AnswerKey to automatically score the worker's test answers and, conditionally, grant a particular Qualification Score.
5. Finally, some Qualifications are not requestable, meaning they will show up in the Qualifications tab of the worker site but cannot be requested.

Any time a requester creates a requestable QualificationType, workers can initiate Qualification Requests to the requester. These requests are not visible in the Requester User Interface, but will accumulate over time, particularly if a given QualificationType is attached to a currently available HITType. The remainder of the tutorial shows how to handle Qualification Requests using MTurkR.