Come join a study of the social aspects of SL

The Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology (MSPP) is running a study on Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). We are looking for residents of Second Life to fill out a survey – it takes about 10-13 minutes. The survey looks at the social aspects of people's lives in both Second Life and offline, and compares them to potential signs of problematic Second Life use. The study is also recruiting players of World of Warcraft to fill out the same survey.

These are the criteria to take this study:

* You must be a current resident of Second Life, or a current player of World of Warcraft. Current use is defined as spending 30 minutes in the past week in either Second Life or World of Warcraft. If you currently participate in both you can take the survey, but you will be asked to identify with which of the two MMOGs are you more involved at the current time.
* You must be 18 years of age or older to take the survey.


If you’re interested in learning more about the survey, click on the link below. You’ll be presented with an informed consent form to give you some more information about the study, so you can decide if you wish to take it. If you’re not interested, but might know someone who might be and who meets the criteria, feel free to forward this email to them. The survey will be open until January 5th, 2010.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/mmog_study_at_mspp

If you have any questions or comments about the study, you can contact Carmine DiChiara, the Principal Investigator, at the email address below.

Thanks for looking,
Carmine DiChiara
carmine_dichiara[at]mspp[dot]edu
Doctoral Student, Clinical Psychology
Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology

ps. If you ask about the study on this forum topic, I'll try to respond here - but I can only discuss so much while the study is going on. I also plan to post a summary of the study results on this forum topic when it's done.

I did the survey and have a few comments.

I have to admit that it is better done than most of the surveys we're asked to do.

1. Two of the questions (which appear more than once) are worded in a way that I think will cause some people to answer opposite to what they intend, since all the other questions are negated in a more natural way:

"There is no one offline that I feel comfortable talking to about intimate personal problems."

"I do not know people offline well enough to get them to do anything important."

2. Questions on the page "Relationship of Second Life Use to Rest of Life" are repetitive. They ask the same things several times in the same way.

3. *Requiring* demographic information will limit responses. Many people will complete the pages up to that point and then stop.

On that last point, you might want to list that requirement on your cover page. If I minded giving my age, sex, and income, I might be a bit angry at discovering that at the END of the survey.

How much will you pay people for the time time they spend completing your survey? I ask because I would like to know what value you think we should put on your research project.

I'd be more than "a bit" angry. I'd see it as conning my time out of me. Of course, there's no way that I'm going to even look at the survey knowing that that's a requirement.

I am really beginning to wonder if Second Life is just someone's idea of a better mousetrap.


.

I'll be uncharacteristically succinct.

Take your survey, fold it until it is all corners, and shove it up your academic ass.

/me carefully takes note of this response . . .

(It's REALLY an experiment on the subject of anger management techniques employed by forum posters . . . )

Please see this thread, taking careful note of post # 1 and especially item #1 in that post.

/327/f7/353456/1.html

He has, as witnessed by post 14: /327/f7/353456/1.html#post2651255 I was particularly interested in this sentence:

I think I will fill out the survey with random answers just to mess it up further

Well, you can certainly tell that I did not read that other thread any further.


However, since he did post this survey, it is quite obvious that he either did not read item #1 or decided to completely ignore it.

Lol I noticed one of the countries one can select for demographic statistics is NORTH KOREA.

Yes I am sure that lots of people in totalitarian oppressive regime where every means of communication with the outside world is restricted or highly controlled have access to Second Life and Worlds of Warcraft.

Hi, I feel kind of bad for you, and I did read your response in the 'Survey' thread, where you posted that you're aware of this kind of response and chose to post your survey here anyway. Just wanted to mention that in my group Virtual Ability, we often host grad students, people doing thesis, doctoral and ph.d candidates, from various unis around the country and out of the USA too. I recently did an interview for a grad student in the UK, about being deaf in SL. When my groups learned of it, lots of them wanted to be interviewed too. In our case, mostly they want to know about virtual worlds and the disabled. These people come inworld, they learn how it works, they hang out with us. They come to our parties, they get to know us, they ask if they can interview us (once we get to know them and feel comfortable) and they never ask us for RL demographics, even though, we are a RL corporation/non profit and that info is actually pretty easily found. They read our website, by the time they are ready to actually ask us questions, they already know a lot. We advise our group that they are here with us, sharing our SL experience, and IF a group member would like to be interviewed, they are more than welcome to contact the student/researcher. It really is a better way. I understand that info on the disabled in virtual worlds isn't what you are going for, here, but just showing you that actually getting to know us, inworld, find yourself an amenable group and join in, heck you may not even need to ask questions, you'll learn it all for yourself. Best of luck to you.

SOP for sorting out differing valuations based on wording.


backhanded tactic for getting edge case people that might have stopped if it were on the first page, some of them may go ahead and complete this anyways so that don't feel they've wasted their time.

and second mentioned question has more problems than just logical negation.... knowing someone well does not equate to being able to get them to do much of anything... unless you want to count blackmail, and then you only have to know them well enough to guess where the bodies are hidden =X

Listing yourself as a tourist shows the usual level of respect I've seen from folks doing studies of us little lab rats. Meanwhile, this may help you in your study:

"Similarly, some of the first educators and researchers in SL were a bit clumsy in their approach. There were early incidents in which Residents felt—rightly—that they were being spied upon or treated like guinea pigs rather than human beings. Imagine how you would feel if an entire class of students set up right next to your vacation hideaway, left trash lying around, logged your conversations, and posted them on the Internet with criticism and mean-spirited comments. This is exactly what happened to some early Residents. Things have improved greatly in the years since then, but sometimes SL Residents are still subject to that kind of inconsiderate behavior. For example, a constant stream of researchers (often students) posts on the Second Life official forums requesting that Residents please take their surveys. Most of these surveys include the same questions that have been asked over and over. Often they aren't spell-checked, or refer to SL as a game—a sure way to irritate a substantial number of Residents. Some Residents make a hobby of critiquing these surveys, pointing out how the questions and their wording make it clear that the researcher isn't familiar with Second Life. Some post outright that they are sick of badly planned surveys and suggest that the researchers log in and do their own research."

From The Second Life Grid: The Official Guide to Communication, Collaboration, and Community Engagement
by Kimberly Rufer-Bach
ISBN-13: 9780470412916

Sounds exciting. I'll get in on this after christmas. Can I bring my boyfriend? Or my husband?

You do realize that as a result of being constantly "invited" to participate in surveys, that most SL forum denizens become so irritated by these invitations that they actually go out of their way to answer your questions in such a way as to completely skew and throw off the results?

Nothing good (well, perhaps seldom) ever comes from posting survey requests.

Please review other posts on methods for potential improvements to your study.

Why does everyone see WoW and SL as synonymous worlds? How can you, or anyone else, equate SL with WoW?

I'm highly incensed that EverQuest was excluded.

/me chuckles

Yes, goodness... if WoW is mentioned, why not EverQuest? Because, ya'know, SL is just another online game.

a combination of media attention, user retention, claimed concurrency, and number of registered accounts.... it has little to do with the function of the platforms, just the perceived abuse by their users if you ask me. oh, that was a rhetorical question =P

I suppose I could, but I don't care quite that much. Here's my comment: This would work much better as a split-plot design, where membership in Problematic and Non-problematic groups is determined by some plausible objective means. It will be difficult to devise any compelling interpretation of correlational results that rely on survey responses for participants to self-identify as having problematic usage patterns.

Also, I did the researcher a huge favour by not participating, because I could only contribute to and possibly exacerbate the massive sampling bias introduced by soliciting Forums readers as subjects. This is a study about social behaviours, and yet it's selectively sampling participants in a specific social medium--these Forums--distinct from the universe about which conclusions are to be drawn. That's a Very Bad Idea.

On the one hand it was a rhetorical question, but it's a question truly worth considering the answers to, so I do thank you kindly for your perspective.

I'm not a huge gamer myself (physical disabilities curbed that passion a long time ago), but I am a game voyeur and I've watched a number of friends play in various on line games. The moment I stepped into SL it was very clear to me that this was NOT a game.

While a virtual environment may hold the same addictive qualities as a game, so do so many other hobbies, fascinations and pastimes. The social activities and perceptions between SL and on line games differ dramatically (unless you are a griefer or con-artist, I suppose).

See above few comments. Since SL is not a GAME in the sense that WoW is, the study is starting off on the wrong premise, hence any conclusions are already invalid.

You know, there have been enough surveys posted here, that someone could write a paper about them, and publish it in a statistics research journal. A working title would be something like "Failures in survey protocols - Selection bias and subject hostility in online worlds".

Speaking of subject hostility, I get this mental image of WoW players casting fireballs at the survey staff *grin* (or whatever it is they do there, I never played).

By the way, there is one research place that used to pay me 200L per questionnaire, for about 10 minutes of answering on a website. I was happy to do it for that small payment.
Given how many newbies are looking to make a bit, they could probably get all the people they need for their survey with a small fee.