Need some Help with a Survey!

[Dunge0nMastr]

Hey folks. A good friend of mine is working to finish up his Masters this semester, and is working on his Thesis. He is currently studying Cyber Psychology and asked if i could help get this Survey out so he can collect data. He is focusing on a field of study that is woefully underrepresented by actual gamers, and hes hoping his work will be able to turn into something big. Please if you have a few minutes, if you could take some time and fill out this survey, here is the introductory letter from my friend.

Hello, my name is Eric Ekman and I am a Masters of Cyberpsychology student at the Dun Laoghaire
Institute for Art, Design, and Technology. For my master’s thesis, I am exploring video game motivations
and behaviors. This study will ask you about your gaming habits and what it is about your favorite games
that you find engaging.

I myself am a lifelong and avid gamer who has been exploring video games and video game culture for
many years. When I was an undergraduate in 2006 I remember first trying to study video games in an
academic setting and was surprised at how out of touch or out of date most of the studies and reference
material was. While this has greatly improved, the academic study of video games is still a nascent
discipline. This study hopes to provide a broad perspective of video game motivations and behaviors by
not limiting respondents to particular genres or even one particular game. Hopefully, this will provide a
more complete picture of what players find engaging about the games they love.

For this study to be successful, I need responses from a sizeable and diverse group of players. Please
take a few minutes to answer my questionnaire by clicking the web link below and feel free to pass the
link on to your friends and family who play video games, regardless of the what type of gamer they are,
or how often they play. If you have any questions, I will occasionally be returning to this thread to reply
or you can send me an email at eekman02@gmail.com.

You can find the questionnaire at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GameEngagement

Thank you for taking the time to read this and helping my friend out! Please if you can spread the word on this as well, the more data he gets the better, should only take a little bit of your time.

[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.

[Dunge0nMastr]

Quick Bump for Eric. Hes past the 70 mark but is eyeing at least 100 so he can really have a solid set of data. Thanks everyone who filled it out here.