A chance to earn 2000 lindens- looking for participants!

See? The Lindens need to make Survey Island! Universities ask for surveys there and residents can get some lindens there. A win win situation! I'm pretty sure that there are residents who would glady do surveys for some cash.

LOL Marianne...

A few concerns - why is it always a Swedish university?

Will people be paid up front (if "chosen for the interview"?

What if the questionnaire IS the end goal and no one is ever "chosen for the interview" so the whole 2000 Linden $, voice chat thing is a moot point?

No, I'm not going to email these questions or anything else. Just because terms are laid down as if we're being done a favor, doesn't mean we have to go by them.

P.S. Unless you are studying voices with some sort of 'truth meter' it is no more a guarantee of sincerity than text chat is. And 'truth meters' are iffy science anyway.

P.P.S. What if all these 'survey threads' are the actual thesis, as well? ("In this instance the test subjects responded with a measure of hostility and irony."

Um, hello? Interviewing the anonymous people behind avatars? You've chosen the one absolute worst way to interview an anonymous person, by subjecting them to a voice interview. Anonymity is preserved via text, not by making them speak to you in their real, non-anonymous voice.

Epic failure.

I think the researcher is saying that the method of "interviewing the anonymous people behind avatars" creates problems for motivating the research and interpreting its results.

The advice to use voice to somehow get around this seems extremely misinformed. It introduces a *massive* sampling bias without any quantified benefit to the method's challenges.

This is not the only challenge, by the way--not even close. A particularly thorny one that comes immediately to mind is intentional deception by participants. Role play is very much a part of Second Life, and role-playing a love-lorn avatar (say) may be an appealing diversion for some participants. It's not as if there's going to be enough data to validate a deception metric, a la the MMPI's notorious L-, F-, and K-scales.

Itt's not always Swedish, but very few are from American students it seems. Are we behind the "I want a degree in video games" curve?

I can't comment on this subject without first telling that I have a very big aversion to almost anything pyshcology. It's the most subjective of all medical fields and, in my mind, absolutely unscientific and is right in the same catagory as mind readers or palm readers. It's not a legitamate medical profession............in fact, I don't believe it is a profession at all. That's my take on the pyschology field. Sorry, if I stepped on any toes..........but that is how I feel.

So, with that in mind, the constant threads requesting "surveys" for some school, university, or group study, to me, stems from people who are seeking a quick and easy way to get something for next to nothing. Say it's a "study' for some "university" such as this request is all about. The OP wants us, the residents of SL, to fill her/him in on just exactly what makes the average user of SL tick. What motives us, interests us, how we deal with the SL society, why we "fall in love", fight with each other, why some become ferrets or monsters or robots or pin up girls or Brat Pitt wannabes. They are too lazy to do their own work. They think a quick survey over a period of a few weeks (or even months) will give them some insight into our minds.........and their professor will see just how bright and intelligent the survey taker is. One step closer to that cherished degree in the Field of Psychology..........and from this bogus undertaking they walk away as some sort of expert. Hell they may even write some thesis and get published (making them officially the final word of the users of virtual worlds). If any of those survey takers wanted to truly find out about people in SL (or any other virtual world) they'd do it by joining the world.......not just signing up. Spend time in the world, talk to people of all types (not in a interview tone...........talk, play, have fun with them, or even fight with them). Become part of that society or world. Read these forums.............I mean read them, all the threads, all the way back as far as the threads are archived (I know that's a lot of work!! But, gee, learning something is not guaranteed to be easy or even fun). These "studies" can't be done in a semester. I'm not sure they could be done in a full 5 year course ciriculum. These "studies" imply that there are a limited number of reasons people choose to "inhabit" SL.........reasons that can be quickly found by a few questions and a few hours of "listening". That's BS. It's total lack of sincerity..........it's wanting to take the easy way by letting our experience(s) be interpertated by someone else (someone who only wants a grade or recognition).

I guess you can see my contempt for this particular field of "medicine"..........so that part you need to remember my prejugdice. But another, perhaps equally, important reason I despise these "surveys". Often the surveys are required to emailed or in some way contact or correspond to the survey taker through another means besides inworld. Such as logging into some website (there is a thread in the Technical Section right now about someone having her Linden account emptied by such a little excursion to a rouge site). Or emailing a completed "questionaire" to someone (that leaves whatever email you use wide open to spam and/or phishing expositions). I don't trust many people I meet on the internet.........and I'm afraid I'd have a very hard time ever trusting someone who asks me to "take a survey".

To all you "students"..............DO IT YOURSELF!! I ain't gonna help you take the easy path.