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Gamers needed for PhD study - Win Amazon vouchers!

eimc201eimc201
edited October 2011 in General Chat
Hi everyone,

I’m sure you get requests like this all the time (and this isn't spam, I promise!) but I’m a psychology PhD student looking for gamers to take part in an online questionnaire I’m running!

I’m trying to provide evidence against the idea that gaming is a solitary activity so it’s mostly focusing on your social experiences and attitudes. It should only take around 20/25 minutes to complete and all completed questionnaires will be entered into a prize draw to win one of five £25 Amazon vouchers (or the equivalent if you’re not in the UK).

Anyone over 18 is able to take part and feel free to pass the link on to anyone else you know who may be interested!

Just follow this link:
https://ww3.unipark.de/uc/The_Team_Tomas/a663/

Feel free to e-mail me with any questions or suggestions (my e-mail address is on the first page of the questionnaire)

Thanks!

Comments

  • ElvenmonkElvenmonk
    edited October 2011
    I did it and see no Amazon vouchers!
  • eimc201eimc201
    edited October 2011
    Once I've got enough people I'll put all the e-mail addresses into a prize draw, so you'll get an e-mail in about 3-4 weeks if you've won :)
  • SilverwolfpetSilverwolfpet
    edited October 2011
    It says 20 Pounds, not 25 pounds. Which one is real?
  • eimc201eimc201
    edited October 2011
    Oops, it's £25! I'll correct it now - thanks for pointing that out!
  • Darth MarsdenDarth Marsden
    edited October 2011
    Lot of questions about online gaming in that, and there weren't many options to say you don't play online. Might be worth thinking about if you do another one of these.
  • ElvenmonkElvenmonk
    edited October 2011
    also the e-mail part said to only put in your e-mail if you were a student.
  • Darth MarsdenDarth Marsden
    edited October 2011
    Elvenmonk wrote: »
    also the e-mail part said to only put in your e-mail if you were a student.
    Read it again. It said if you were a student, then to put your college e-mail address.

    It could be made a little clearer, but it does still make sense if you read it carefully.
  • divisiontendivisionten
    edited October 2011
    Done and done! Good luck on the study.
  • IrishmileIrishmile
    edited October 2011
    I gotta be honest I am sort of on the fence on if I should close this thread or not.
  • AlcoremortisAlcoremortis
    edited October 2011
    Well...I took the quiz...but I'm not really sure I'm the type of gamer they were looking for. I'm most definitely a "fits and spurts" kind of gamer and have no regular patterns to distinguish me.
  • WarpSpeedWarpSpeed
    edited October 2011
    One little problem if you're doing this for a Ph.D. study. It's a self-selected survey, and you're posting about it on a forum where gamers come together to be social. The ones who hole themselves up with their game machines and don't care about the rest of the world won't see it. I'm only pointing this out because you can expect your research review committee to question if your survey is sufficiently scientific, and you'll need to have an answer for that.

    Anyway, I didn't look at the survey (I don't like Amazon much), but on the general topic of games and social behavior, one of the nice things about adventure games is that it encourages that sort of thing. A couple of friends or a bunch of friends interested in the same game can get in a room and play it together. It doesn't matter who's controlling it, because anyone can interject, "Did you try spreading the peanut butter on the TV remote?" This is especially helpful on many of the older games with hard puzzles, where a lot of people thinking about them at once can get at the solutions faster.

    (I had a psychology minor on my undergrad degree.)
  • divisiontendivisionten
    edited October 2011
    As someone who took the survey, it's fairly obvious what is trying to be correlated. And I will agree with WarpSpeed- posting it on clearly social gaming forums is going to give your responses a very serious skew- but only if it has been posted here. As I can tell by the survey itself, it's been solicited to a number of different diverse groups.

    And while the survey is anonymous, the thing about posing it here is actually quite ingenious. This is a social forum, and we WILL skew the results. Or at least I think we will, which is a theory in its own right.

    Anyway, because we have a link that's unique, s/he can see where people came from when they took the survey, and, I hope, later will be able to separate out responses based on where the person came from on the internet.

    I had to do surveys two years ago for a psychology class on procrastination, and my group decided to give them out in person on college campuses, give them out in various clubs, and post links on Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Facebook.

    We couldn't see individual responses, but we could see where they came from. So we could look at procrastination not only as a whole, but also from places where people were likely to take stupid online surveys as a form of procrastination (Facebook). It skewed the results, just like posting a social gaming survey would be on a social gaming site, but it was skewed in a way that was meaningful.
  • JwabJwab
    edited October 2011
    Have done - know how hard it is to get responses and it's good that someone is looking at this area so best of luck.

    Self-selected samples come with any online survey so I'm sure a phd student is well aware of these potential bias effects. Whether you're offering money, course credits or goodwill or whether you're getting people to do it online or in person - short of breaking ethical guidelines and setting up double blind studies in which you secretly observe and don't tell people, there is absolutely no way to avoid bias. The fact is loads of psychological theories have been based on incredibly small samples or the behaviours of student populations (to which researchers have easiest access) being applied to society as a whole. It's one of the issues with the field and I'm sure it will be accounted for in the experiment design.
  • eimc201eimc201
    edited October 2011
    Thanks so much to everyone who has taken part and thanks also for the comments and suggestions - I really appreciate it!

    Jwab is right in that there are always issues with surveys and I'll be interpreting the results with all the possible biases in mind. As divisionten suggests, I've been recruiting from all over the place so lots of different gaming forums, in internet cafes, around my university, psychology mailing lists etc so although I'm not going to be able to get to everyone, I'm hoping that my sample is going to be representative enough for the results to be interesting, even if they have to be interpreted slightly cautiously, as with any online questionnaire.

    It's really great to hear your opinions on the social elements of games, as this is obviously what I'm trying to tap into. One reason why I wanted to include adventure gamers is because it's social in a different way to, say, MMOs and it's really interesting to see WarpSpeed echo that idea by pointing out how collaborative they can be.

    Thanks so much once again to everyone who has taken the time to do the study and offer their suggestions :)
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