Seeking advice regarding inworld recruitment of research participants

I am a student at the University of Arizona.
I, along with other students, will be conducting psychological research in Second life, this summer.

Can anyone give us advice on good ways to recruit participants, besides posting notices in the forums?

Are there any Second Life researchers out there who have found successful inworld recruitment methods?

The study will involve a short initial web-based questionnaire and then an interactive task in Second Life.
I believe it will take 15 minutes or less for each participant to participate and we plan on compensating each participant with 100L$ (based upon the popularity and payment rates of Second Life camping/survey systems).

Thank you,
Avery

PS,
Is this the best forum to post this question in?

The forum really is a very small segment of the sl population. I don't have a good suggestion as to setting it up in world but it would definitely give you a better sample. There are similar surveys posted here at least once a week.

Just my personal guess, but offering any kind of compensation is probably not going to attract people who care about the survey, but people who want the money and who will just tick random boxes to get through it in the shortest amount of time possible and they might go for it with multiple alts.

For anyone else, 35 cents really isn't going to be something they'll care a whole lot about and they'd probably fill it in regardless of compensation.

Save your Lindens and instead create a group and put it in classifieds. Don't offer money because that will distort your research miserably. Explain what you are seeking in your group charter.

I think that will work better for your purposes.

If you will send me an im i can put you in touch with the folks on my sims who conduct research in a couple of diff ways...one for money in a structured scripted setting and one who does more interview based research. Both have had their SL findings published and im sure would be happy to help you. I can also give you a tour of how their spaces are set up on our sims etc.

im jojogirl Bailey in world...

Otherwise, any results you find will only be true for the group you actually select.

** professor hat on**

If you don't plan to select a proper probability sample

http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/sampprob.php

then it does not matter how you get people to respond to your sample. However, as you are students, your professors might allow you to pretend.

**takes off professor hat**

I often fill these out.

The other day I filled one out that gave me $300 for participating.

I noticed that I took a lot more care over that one than the ones that didn't offer money.

That led me to think that by offering a small stipend for participating, a person running a survey might get more well-considered answers.

coco

Tough call....I'd do it with or without the L's.

I like the idea of setting up a group and running a classified.....you can also post adds through different sims that give folks a notcard with information on the survey....you could even supply the link to the web site in the notecard.


I don't necessarily agree that offering L's will create less honest prticipants.....you're gonna get what you're gonna get, regardless of compensation. Some folks may well make a joke of it and fill out the survey with garbage answers so it's really a matter of trying to hit as broad a spectrum of people as possible. The survey bit has been done to death in SL it seems..... but no doubt it remains a great topic to do psychological or social studies on so my advice would be spend some time in world. Get to know SL and the types of people that inhabit it.....and make your decision based on what YOU feel is the best way to go about it. You can't do a thing about how honest folks will or will not be.....so a little research before your research is probably the best thing to do.

there are a few dozen people in the forum who would likely do quite a bit to get first dibs at your results.

Everyone on the forum has a vested interest in SL and/or well above average interest in SL.

(creator here, mostly hobby scripting)

Do it the same way you would do it in rl... find the places where your subjects like to hang out and politely ask... just asking in the forums will get you a very biased look of sl.

If you have not spent much time in sl then I would suggest you do a little research on SL itself. Understanding this world will help you understand your subjects better and where to find them.

.d

I would think that offering renumeration based on current camping payments would tend to attract a disproportionate number of people who camp. I know $L100 wouldn't entice me. In fact I'd say that I would be more likely to give carefully considered answers if I were doing it to be helpful than if I were doing it for a small amount of money. I would be interested in hearing the results obtained by any of the people who have asked us to take polls for their SL research.

Of course for all we know OP's question is some kind of psych experiment to see what we answer.