SL survey on SL communication and culture

Hello people!

I am doing my thesis research on SL communication (CMC) and culture.
I am developing a questionnaire with questions on these topics. The questionnaire would be completely anonymous.

How would I get the most response without it costing me (a lot of) money?

The research is for an international organisation which deals with intercultural issues and wants to create workshops or trainings on SL.

I thank you all in advance!

With kind regards,

Babzy Dreamscape
(Barbara)

Offer a nice amount and hold a drawing from the completed responses.

Good luck

i'm really getting sick of these questionnaire threads.

I wish all these surveyors would get together and create ONE instrument that we could all answer ONCE, then mine it for their theses. Maybe LL could put up a survey on the site here, and sell the results to students and researchers.

Babz, we get maybe one or two of you here a week. Gets a little old, you know? Plus there's always the possibility that the "researcher" is really looking for product marketing data, rather than a scholarly treatise, or even worse, phishing for personal information. No offense intended.

The last guy offered a L$5,000 random prize drawing, plus smaller 2nd and 3rd place prizes. That's not "too expensive", is it? I think he got a pretty good response rate.

I'm more concerned at how many people are doing graduate work analyzing why people play a computer game.

No wonder people keep walking up to me and saying...."I've read about you... oh yea... Cunundrum...right..."

I don't really mind these "please fill out my survey" threads. I don't even mind taking a few minutes to complete one. However, there does seem to be an awful lot of them.

Has anyone ever seen the results of any of these surveys posted anywhere?

Perhaps a good incentive would be "if you complete my survey, I'll post the results here when it's done".

I think it is normal that people are researching SL. It is a relatively new phenomenon and it is being discovered as a great platform for real businesses. But I can imagine that people are getting tired of questionnaire requests. ( I havent been asked myself so far though)

My organisation is a non-profit organisation supported by the UN which wants to increase intercultural awareness in the world and which sees SL as a good platform for that.

I am planning on contacting LL to see whether they can provide me with some general statistics, but I will need some answers from the residents themselves.

Giving away a prize amongst the respondents sounds like a good option to me. I am just wondering.. I am planning to set up an online questionnaire which people can access and fill out online.

Ah well..If I cant think of a way to make this work I can always start to perform sexual favours for people in order to have them fill out the questionnaire..


btw. I would be happy to post some results after it's done

Yeah SL porno pictures!!!

I would suggest some SL ground work as well- join the community- live it- explore it- when you are a part of it, you will have your own grasp as well and can make comparisons.

Hmmm... now that you mention it... perhaps someone should do a meta-analysis of SL research. It could well be that researching SL is a sure-fire way to not get a degree. (Or, perhaps, to get sucked into SL and never complete that pesky dissertation. )

LOL. Keep that thought for a couple of hours. Until Trout checks in , at least.

I am walking around and talking to people and living the SL life on a daily basis as well.. So I will definately use my own observations but in addition I will need as many answers as possible on a standardized questionnaire.

Perhaps you could add some credibility to your project by naming this nebulous organization for which you are doing this study, because so far I don't see the connection between a thesis and a UN organization.

It has always bothered me that so many surveys are done in the forums. The forums have already removed a large portion of the people in SL by only allowing premium accts. So any forum survey is pre-slanted.

Perhaps you could add some credibility to your project by naming this nebulous organization for which you are doing this study, because so far I don't see the connection between a thesis and a UN organization.

Your offer of sexual favours has certainly not helped to legitimize your efforts, nor is likely to meet with approval of any UN-supported organization.

I suggest that companies looking to do business in SL (non-profit, right) hire some folks to spend a few months there in person to find out what they need to know instead of cutting corners and harrassing people here on a weekly basis.

B.

Wow, weird.
I just posted my reply and half of it appeared on the first page of this thread, then the whole thing appeared again. Nor am I able to delete either.
Has anyone seen this happen before?

(And if I were in-world, I'd ask someone with a different video card if they were seeing what I'm seeing )

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Maybe you could do some research on that, Brenda. How about a questionnaire?

yep, just the first paragraph is showing up for me on the previous page. Strange...

The sexual favours comment was obviously a joke.... If you can't see through that..

This thread was meant to enquire how I should go about doing such a questionnaire... if I cant make jokes here... where else.. This is not the official questionnaire thread.. if there ever will be one..

Hmmmm you may be on to something. Perhaps I can use it for Doctorate Studies.

You are obviously new to working with larger and/or public organizations. "obviously a joke" hasn't saved many a prominent head from rolling.

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Are there enough researchers of Second Life to do a thesis on "why do people research Second Life?", yet?

I think you must have caught people on a bad day, Babzy - I don't understand why there's been such a bad reaction to your request.

Any survey is going to be skewed simply because some people like filling out surveys, and some don't. But here are some suggestions that may or may not be helpful:

1. I'd be really wary of offering a prize draw, for several reasons. Firstly, that really will skew the survey. Some people play SL as a game, don't want to spend real money in it, so earn small amounts of money in-world by camping or DJ-ing, and use the few hundred L$ they have to buy the occasional item. Others spend tens of thousands in-world, and are happy to invest real money in their enjoyment of SL. I'm in the latter category - winning L$5,000 wouldn't be a big incentive for me if I didn't enjoy filling out surveys (as it happens, I *do* enjoy filling out surveys). It would be a bigger incentive to people in that first category though. So you'd be skewing your survey to people in that group - so you wouldn't be getting a good representative cross section. Ideally, you won't *both* groups of SL users to participate. Secondly, if someone's completing a survey just for the money, the quickest return would be for them to randomly tick answers instead of thinking about them. I'm not saying everyone would, but you only need a handful of people doing that to ruin a survey.

2. Don't restrict advertising the survey to the forums here. Most SL users never use the forums. In meatspace, pollsters stand on street corners and ask a wide cross section of people for their opinions. You could try the same in shopping malls, clubs and so on - anywhere where there are lots of people in-world.

3. Make it a well designed questionnaire. Some of the questionnaires we've seen linked to on here have been really well designed, others have been awful. From my point of view (as someone completing a questionnaire), I hate black/white questions - for example, "how similar in appearance is your avatar to you - not at all similar/very similar" was one question I saw. What about the many, many half way houses - lots of people want their avatar to have some similarities to them, but perhaps they don't want to have the height, beer gut or whatever that they may have in RL!

4. Don't be platform specific - there are Mac and Unix users of SL as well as PC users, so don't stick a Word document up assuming everyone can read it. Even if we can, how do we reply to it? There are some good sites out there designed specifically for doing online surveys. If you're working in a university, talk to staff in your Social Sciences schools. There are some great commercial (and normally expensive) survey packages out there that your university probably subscribes to, which will not only let you design a survey but will analyse the results for you too, which you could use for free. Publishing the survey simply involves giving people a web link to take them to the survey to complete.


Good luck!

Thank you Damien for your elaborate answer! This is an answer I can work with!

I was planning on making it an online survey.

I am having a similar question as your example question in mind but then have a rating 1-7 (or 1-5).

I have designed some questionnaires before and my main concern is to have enough respondents.

I hope more serious suggestions and tips will follow!