Tobold's Blog
Monday, April 20, 2009
 
Your chance to help MMO research

The Newcastle University Business School is conducting research to investigate the potential beneficial or detrimental effects of playing MMORPGs during off-job hours on employee well-being. For this purpose they are looking for MMORPG players with a full-time real-world job, the help them by filling out a survey, and they asked me whether maybe I know such people. :) So if you don't mind filling out a survey, here is your chance to help science!
Comments:
I filled the survey to help the guys out. However, while filling it, I realized some facts about myself and noticed I was giving more honest answers than ever before. Think this is the most useful side of a survey for a filler - apart from it being priceless for the researcher. I would very like someone to comment on my "results" though.

How exactly did you feel I wonder?
 
I stopped answering. They do not have the proper questions for a somewhat addicted MMO junkie who is in a rather long general MMO burnout phase by now.

And the questions reek of the usual stuff, give away the intention and thoughts of the guys who made it. They want to know if you are addicted enough to the game so that everything else suffers or not.

I cannot help, mute, but I had this kind of MMO survey already several times. I wonder if they want to find out something new or just generate a new batch of data, which has already been done numerous times as I told you.
 
You might have stopped too early there. They also want to know whether you are addicted enough to your work that your game suffers. :)
 
I completed the survey. It wasn't well designed... they clearly didn't want to "investigate". There was no exploring or anything qualitative about it. The survey pretty much followed down a path of a pre-conceived hypothesis, with poorly designed question batteries that didn't really match the response options provided.

Expect a sensationalised report from NUBS (haha... great acronym) that will hit the newspapers "proving" the detrimental effects of playing MMORPGs on employee moral/focus etc.

Quite disappointing.
 
I've got to agree with the previous posters: the survey seemed aimed at "proving" that MMO players are weirdoes who are ruining their career by playing too much.

I wonder what answers you'd get if you substituted the words "watching TV" for "playing MMOs".
 
Yeah, all the questions are leading people. It's a way to introduce bias, and these researchers certainly would know that.
 
Of course the questions are leading. They have a hypothesis and they design the survey to support it. Sensationalist "researching" 101. Get someone with a decent statistics background to design your survey or don't even bother.
 
I went all the way through the survey also. I wasn't at all impressed with the questions, and found them to be leading and loaded throughout the survey.
 
Just finished the survey. It appears the hypothesis they are trying to support is fairly narrow, but anyway, I would like to see the results and conclusions.
 
Post a Comment

<< Home
Newer›  ‹Older

  Powered by Blogger   Free Page Rank Tool