The Social Capital of Virtual Worlds

About a year ago, I posted a request for volunteers to complete a survey for my grad school assignment. I didn't get a lot of response from Second Life users, but there was a bit, and you still might find it interesting.

I completed my research and finished my paper last February and I intended to have it published in a peer-reviewed journal of some sort. Well, between graduating, starting a new job, and hurrying to catch up to my friends in another MMO, I lost all momentum. I realized that if I didn’t self-publish the results I’d never get this information out there.

So, if you’re interested, you can read my graduate research paper here: www.cindygreenan.com/socialcapitalofmmos. There’s also a “TLDR” version if you want to just see a bunch of colorful graphs of the most interesting results.

Thank you to everyone that participated. I received an amazing number of responses and I’m really grateful. I hope you enjoy reading my analysis.

There's something really weird about your HTML on that site. In Firefox at least it's all scribbled over with white lines.

Thanks for posting your paper. It's very rare that a researcher tells us that!

I've just started reading...

@Argent: It looks okay to me, and I use Firefox.

That's odd. It looks fine in Firefox to me. And it was created with the latest version of Wordpress, so it should be more reliable than if I had tried to code it myself. What version of Firefox are you using?

3.5.6 Mac

The frame with the banner in is displaced down over the top of the text.

I was able to download the paper by reading the page source.

Sorry about that. I'll check on my mac when I get home. Lunch break is almost over. I'm glad you were still able to access it even if it was annoying.

I like the paper. Sorry that we Second Lifers are such a tough nut to crack.

I have to admit, since your paper is good news, it would be odd if I didn't like it.

It's flashblock. For some bizarre reason your banner is a flash applet. o_O