Help with SL research?

And the Survey says!

http://www.nmc.org/news/nmc/sl-educator-survey

http://thinkbalm.com/2008/10/10/second-life-survey-says-%E2%80%9Ctry-it-for-work-%E2%80%94-you%E2%80%99ll-like-it%E2%80%9D/

https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/educators/2007-March/007428.html

http://slsurvey.wordpress.com/survey-result/

Those are the ones I found the quickest.. if I expanded it to multiple languages I am sure I could find more.

> 4. How long have you been playing Second Life? *

I stopped here -- I do not PLAY Second Life and I saw no choice for "Not Applicable".

Yup...I'm going to get on that when I have my results. I think its a good idea and could save the forums and researchers alot of trouble.

Anyone here have Sticky Abilities, or is that just the Lindens?

If you see a thread that says "survey" just don't click on it if you don't want to take it.

Excellent idea. You and Key M. should hook up.
/327/33/310544/1.html

Sent him a PM....

Sorry guys that I was one of them. I've got an idea. Gimmie a week and hopfully I'll have a helpful solution. I'll make it right!!!!

No - this is a forum and I get to have my say.

Rather than just a sticky, how about a separate forum topic? Something like "Post your survey here." However, there are rumours that LL is going to radically change the forum format so it might be a moot point in making any suggestions?

Irksome, I agree. It's one of the things survey posters consistently get wrong. Others are understimating the age range of residents (I've seen more than one survey with a top age range of "30 or older", referring to avatars as "characters", referring to accounts as avatars and generally assuming SL is like WoW.

Why?

Just once, I would like to hear why SL is the chosen subject from people who obviously aren't users of the program. What makes you pick it out of the blue?

Moreover, I'd like to know what good they think this "research" will do when they have no context to put it in. It's just a bunch of crap to be spun to people who can't tell the difference.

Thanks to everyone who took it, and I'm sorry for causing a fuss. I looked over the stickied topics, saw nothing against posting surveys, and posted without knowing several had already been posted.

To explain myself a bit more fully, here's what I said to someone who sent me a PM:

My English course is entitled English 102: Inquiry into Games and Toys, at the University of Tennessee.

One of the papers is a "Hands On" research paper, where we're required to have people take surveys and observe behavior during a game or something similar. I chose to do Second Life, because I had heard a lot about it recently. While I know it's not really a game, my professor said it would be fine and I thought it would be really interesting to see why people use it to complement their first lives.

So I've been travelling around in world, seeing how things work, and asking people to take this survey.

*twitch*

Mommy, please make the bad men stop!

*curls up in a fetal position on the floor*

Hi Will. I am sorry (and quite shocked) to see that you got such a lot of negative responses (including some fairly offensive ones) to your perfectly reasonable request. That said, having looked at your survey, I can say that I am not interested in filling it out either...

...but - you might find the following data-rich web-link very useful for researching SL demographics:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Market_Data_Demographic_Studies

I hope this helps you with your studies.

Hi Will, I calmed down enough to take your survey and I must say it's not bad. I even answered honestly Thanks for letting us know more about what the survey is for.

One thing I think is missing, especially in the context of "games and toys", is questions about content creation. For many people, SL provides their first steps in 3D modelling, texturing, animation or scripting, and for a huge number of residents it's what they love most about SL.

Really, though, the best way to research SL is to spend time there - exploring, doing stuff, talking to people. Without that, you will not have any reference points for making sense of your results.

Ok, you are in school to learn something, hopefully? Have you learned anything from the responses you are getting?

Sorry Will, I think you got unfairly jumped on because of the number of similar requests that the forum has been hit with. Don't take it personal, you are not alone, all of the recent survey requests have received a similar treatment. People here are just tired of it. You didn't know it, because you didn't spend any time lurking and getting to know the layout of the territory before you jumped in. That is a good idea to do before joining any new discussion forum.

Another problem is Linden Labs have pretty much abandoned the forums after closing most of them. Seemingly throwing up their hands in disgust that they were totally unable to please their customers. So you won't find much moderation, its harder then hell to get anyone to post a new sticky or update the old ones, and the rules are pretty much made up of what the community is willing to support and put up with.

Linden Labs doesn't seem to care much about user input, only pays lip service to it, and has made some stupid mistakes which cost the community thousands of real dollars, which has created a lot of animosity. Perhaps that is an angle you should cover, how poor customer service, mismanagement and lack of communication creates anger and resentment in a community of people who have all been, and many still are, excited and enthusiastic about Second Life itself.

OK I took your survey, and it wasn't bad or long. But its too bad you did not spend more time getting to know SL better before writing it.

For example,

How long have you been playing Second Life?
Less than a month
More than a month but less than a year.
More than a year

I have been active in SL since Feb. 2005. and have friends who were here about two years before that.


6. What about the Second Life world made you stay? *
The people
The Second Life World itself
Opportunities offered that were not offered in first life (flying, teleportation, ability to change appearance)
Other (Please Specify)

Creative opportunities is a huge one for many people and you totally missed it.


7. How long do your see yourself participating in Second Life? *
Not much longer
A few months longer
A year or so longer
As long as I can!

I have already been here for over 4 years, is that not relevant? You seem to think SL is brand new last year.


Perhaps what you should have done, or should still do, is come into the forums and ask the residents to help you design a survey that really reflected the goals you talked to your professor about. "why people use it to complement their first lives."

Why? or How? I don't see that your survey gets at the "Why" at all. To get at the "Why" you would need to get more into what people find lacking, or what hurdles they have in their first lives and what did they find in SL that fulfilled that.

For example there are many people here who are have disabilities or illnesses that make it hard for them to function in RL but they can do wonderful things here.

Will, the biggest problem is that we are inundated with surveys. Do a search for the word survey and I can almost bet that between all the one in the past all your research will be done. If not then I post the following which was my response to the last survey request in the forums. While the text of the quoted text below may not address you directly, I think it does a very good job of explaining why your survey will be useless in the long run.

Quote:
To the OP:

If you are a professor, as you claim, then why not join Second Life and experience it. No conclusions from survey based research are valid as survey results can be skewed by inaccurate, read: made up, responses.

Any good academic knows that a theory without repeated experimentation and duplicatable results is a useless assumption. If you really insist on others doing your research for you the there is a Search function on the forums and I am quite certain that the keyword 'survey' will return hundreds of lines of response for dozens of surveys.

Sorry to be so blunt, but the survey BS is getting out of hand and is really a useless way of performing research which produces an even more useless result.

I'm the one who signed the survey "Margaret Mead".

Hi Will. I'm sorry you've had such a response from people here in the forum. As others have said, there are a LOT of surveys here. But you'll find most here give good advice. Marianne had some excellent advice for instance.

And the folk here are a pretty nice bunch in general.

I'll go and take your survey. And PM me if you'd like to ask further questions. UTK eh?

I'm a grad of UTK too ... go Vols!

But that does not allow those who enjoy venting hostilities to "do their part". /me chuckles

Prurient interest.

New plan everyone. From now on, when a survey comes on here, we all jump right to it and butcher the hell out of it. Just took the survey and completely made things up for the OP. Good luck with your research

*Of course* - especially those that claim "we ask no personal info" then proceed to do exactly that.