Online Survey about Second Life

Hi Second Life users.

We are a group of students from Aalborg University in Denmark. As a part of our education in general communication and multimedia we are writing a paper on communication and communities in virtual worlds.

If you would like to tell us a bit about your Second Life experience, How you influence Second Life and how Second Life has influenced you, please take a few minutes to fill out our survey, which can be found here:

www.askpeople.dk?i2=secondlife

Kind Regards
Visti Madsbøl, Mette Larsen, Stine Josefine Hedemann Hansen, David Kiel and Louise Noergaard Glud.

I took this survery, very good and stimulating questions. Is there any way you will publish the combined answers?

Why does your survey not use the web address of the university?

I'll take the survey for L$5000 I do market research sometimes, and they always pay USD$ for time spent.

I would like to know more about you, and your lab, before I fill anything like this out.

Is this research approved by Linden Lab?

-Ghoti

Hi everybody.

First I would like to thank all of you for your interest in our project.

nimrod Yaffle: I am afraid that won't be possible. Since we, in the beginning of our survey, informs people that "All data from the form will only be used to our study of Second Life, and is strictly confidential", it would be highly unethical to publish the results.

Selador Cellardoor: Because students don't have access to the university domain. However, the domain of the university is http://aau.dk/ ( http://en.aau.dk/ for an english version) if you are interested.

Hank Ramos: Since we are students we regrettably dont have the possibility to offer US, nor Linden dollars for your time.

Desmond Shang: Our lab is a subdivision of "The Faculty of Humanities" on Aalborg University in Denmark, and our specific education is called Humanistic Informatics.
You can read everthing there is to know about our education right here: http://www.huminf.aau.dk/index.uk.html

Ghoti Nyak: Unfortunately, we were not aware, that we needed ethical approval from Linden Lab. We will contact Linden Lab tomorrow (Central European Time) and ask for their approval.
However, we have recieved courses in ethics, and if we, in any way, fail to apply with the ethical guidelines given to us through these lessons, we will not pass this semester. Therefore, it would not be in our interest do do anything unethical with the results of this survey.

I hope this answers your questions.

Kind Regards
Visti Madsbøl

I just read that and I think it's kinda BS as a requirement. As an advisory, perhaps, but LL shouldn't have right of prior restraint on research work.

Besides, this is just a simple survey. No Harm, No Foul.

hi mummel,

yes, you definitely should get approval from linden labs for this. i took your survey, and was curious about this question.



a large number of people run successful businesses in SL, and use their time running their businesses. i'm curious as to why this was not included as an option. feel free to PM me if divulging that info will give away too much about your study. it's an interesting topic.

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Thanks, but if you compile the data into a bulk generalization, then it will still be confidential. Kind of like in high school, when kids take a strictly confidential survey asking about drugs and alcohol and cheating, they release the information as a whole, not individual results.

It isn't BS, it's something I, for one, am very glad of. We aren't an ant farm for anyone to study secretly. We want things to be up-front and legitimate, and, as LL said, "Second Life exists for its members." We have the right to say "no." Maybe you weren't here when original issue came up.

No, we're an ant farm for Linden Lab to study secretly!

Have you read this?

I took the survey; no trackable personal information was asked. It seems to me they are asking for voluntary out-of-world participation to collect data about people's perceptions of Second Life. That's completely different from observing us and chatting us up inworld then publishing that information in a study.

For just a simple survey, I completely agree - its pretty benign.

However, for a worst-case scenerio of why we do need this requirement for research approval, check out this thread: Panda In A Petri Dish

I guess its just better to be safe than sorry.

I completed the survey. It was fairly painless and not invasive.

Briana Dawson

Thank you for your kind response, it was more than sufficient.

Sadly it required some 'real life' information that I simply do not give out, for reasons particular to my own situation, but I think most people would have no problem with it.

Good luck and I hope you learn something important for the benefit of all mankind.

A suggestion. As for your questions where you had "Other", it would have been nice to have a box besides those so you could type in what made you check Other. Some of this information might not fall into nice category, but some might. Like people using SL for business.

Ah. I see.

Thanks for the pointer to that thread.

I didn't read through panda's entire thread, but he should have built a little maze and handed out white mouse furry AVs to the students.

The survey, I'm sure, is fine - that's one thing. My issue was with the LL requirements being called BS, since I don't think they are. LL makes a few simple requests of scholars - I think that is a good thing.

I thought WE were the ones studying Linden Lab.
/me peers back at Jeska through the post - hi!

I took the survey ...

One comment about the survey itself - I think you virtually excluded the entire creative aspect of SL as reasons people do things and stay online. There were some mentions of it, but the survey was heavy-handed on chatting and exploring.

Hi Everybody

Once again, I would like to thank you all for your interest.

Anya Dmytryk: The main focus of our project is communication and sociology. Since there are so many functions and opportunities in Second Life, we have been forced to prioritize which aspects we would like to look in to. The commercial part of Second Life really isn't that relevant in relation to our education, so we have choosen to prioritize other aspects higher.
That being said, I think you have a point. We probably should have included "business" as an option, but since it isn't our main focus, I don't think that it will affect the outcome of the project greatly.

nimrod Yaffle: The difference between our survey and the high school surveys you reffer to, is, that we actually promise the respondents, that their answers will not be published. whether or not it would hurt anyone to publish anonymous statistics isn't really the issue. The issue is, that we have promised people, that we won't.

Desmond Shang: Of course, it is voluntary if you want to participate in the survey or not, and I, of course, respect your decision.
The reason why we have included the "real life information" in our survey, is because we would like to make a demographical profile of the users - mainly to see, if the culture of a specific nationality or group of people (fx programmers) influences the culture in Second Life.

Noel Marlowe: Yes, it would have been a good idea - however, depending on the number of respondents, it could very well turn out to be an impossible job to process all the answers given in the "other" box. So instead of people using their time to fill out boxes with information we wouldn't be able to use, we figured it would be more fair to the respondents, to simple give them a checkbox.

Hiro Pendragon: You are right. The survey is "heavy-handed on chatting and exploring". The main focus on this semester of our education is how people communicate through- and to some extend interact with the computer as a media. Of course, the creative aspect is a rather large part of the interaction, but with our project being focused on communication and sociology, we simply don't have the time nor the resources to look at both these aspects and the creative aspect.
It would of course be nice to be able to look at all the aspects of Second Life, but we have been forced to pick a few elements out and focus on them.

I hope this answers your questions. If I have overlooked any or you have more questions, feel free to ask.

Kind Regards
Visti Madsbøl