Need some Help with a Survey!

[Drajor]

In no way am I devaluing what your friend is trying to achieve and I realise the near-impossible nature of getting 'good data' (see diverse, sizeable) for things like this. But posting this on such a niche forum /could/ introduce unwanted bias. Self-selecting samples, enough said.

I wish your friend luck!

[eekman]

Hey, this is Eric. Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, all correlational data like this has two limitations, lack of ability to make causal inference and self selection bias. The last point can be especially true in niche communities, as you point out. Frankly, I'm sending this questionnaire everywhere I can think of in the hopes of attaining enough responses to get good statistical significance and HOPEFULLY a representative sample of the gaming population. The last one is more a hope, as I also have recruitment posts on more general gaming areas such as escapistmagazine, pennyarcade forums, ign, /r gaming and others. In the end, self selection bias will be a strong limitation of this study and hopefully through good tracking of data I can mention what that bias is and how it might affect the results (ie: if 95% of my respondents put Everquest as a favorite game and MMMORPGs as a favorite genre).

In any case, I would like to personally thank all of you for helping me out. Without people kind enough to take time out of their day (for science!), there wouldn't be a study at all.

[Drajor]

Hey Eric,

Come back and let us know how you go with this! I am certainly interested as I have half a plan to do some post-grad stuff w/ games development in the future. I actually majored in Games Development but it was more 'hands on' rather than the theoretical. I am a maths major now (can't stop studying lol).

[eekman]

I'd be glad to. I probably won't have all the data crunched for another month or two, but I would be happy to email the results to you or post them up if there's enough interest.