Louie+Pausch+Research+Project

=Research Project=

1.
Team America: Disaster Capitalists are taking an empirical approach to our research project. I got cracking on that project Wednesday, March 19th. I interviewed two people. One was Japanese, and the other Australian. The research itself was fluid with the Australian, but arduous with the Japanese woman. Language was a slight barrier, but with some time, we overcame it. The Australian asked for money for his time, but the Japanese woman did not. Both seemed willing to give answers to me, but I feel that without the disclaimer that we wrote, this project would cause me to get shot. From now on, I think I will try to do research at a more reasonable hour, because the people on late at night seem to be internationals and scary people. But I suppose we need to sample them too. I also think I'm going to work on getting some information about the population of Second Life. Then we can see if we are oversampling any group.

I still have not managed to find any population data about Second Life. American brought up the prospect of oversampling based on political ideology, but I believe that SL is populated mainly by liberals and libertarians. So who knows. At any rate, I did some more sampling. People seem to be either very eager to share their information, or very reticent about it. There is very little middle ground. This is proving to be a little bit more difficult than I previously imagined, but we shall see how it all shakes out.

2.
More interviews: today with a SL pro whose been on for more than two years, and a dominatrix. It was interesting. My hypothesis bore out that people who are on during the middle of the day are more likely to be from the US, since everyone I spoke to, even those who didn't want to talk to me, were from the United States.

3.
I have not updated the journal in way too long. Also, we received a pretty stern (at least by Dr. Rice's standards) talking to about journaling. At any rate, I have completed the interviews for which I was responsible. Interviewing has been an interesting process. In the beginning, I interviewed directly. This means I would get into the chat box or IM box and ask every person the question directly. This was a slow and tedious process. I would say at that rate, I averaged right at 2 interviews every hour. Also, by the time the hour was completed and the two interviews had taken place, I was so pissed off at Second Life that I had absolutely no desire to do any more interviews. However, I learned a few weeks ago how to write note cards. This made the process infinitely easier.

When I wrote the notecard for our project, I could include the confidentiality agreement, survey questions, and project description neatly in one document, instead of attempting to tediously write them all into a real time chat box. By delivering interviewees a notecard with all the information on it, I was able to increase my interviews per hour to around 5. Also, the process was not nearly as frustrating, and I could hack away at interviewing for a few hours at a time.

4.
Finding people to interview was an interesting process. I decided to not worry about oversampling and to attempt to just run around the grid in as random a fashion as possible attempting to interview people. The statistics classes I have taken lead me to believe that this is actually a good thing to do for the data. At any rate, the process went something like this: It was kind of strange. However, it worked pretty well. There are usually a bunch of people standing alone, and mostly they don't mind talking to people. Finding people never presented too much of a problem for me.
 * 1) Open "Map."
 * 2) Find a spot where there is one green dot, alone.
 * 3) Teleport there and run after the person
 * 4) When the person has been found, accost them, saying this line: "hey...I'm a university student doing a research project about SL...can I ask you 9 questions?"
 * 5) If they say no, thank them and leave. If they say yes, begin the interview process.

5.
The people you find while interviewing are sometimes interesting: This woman is a stripper. I met her underwater, where she was "changing" She said she usually does her changing underwater where nobody could find her. I, however, found her pretty easily.

This man is a rabbi. I met him in this spot that has a huge Star of David on the Map. He said he was going to service, but he would answer the question as fast as he could. I didn't have time to ask him if he was a rabbi in RL, but he certainly was old enough to have been.

These two ladies were polar opposites from one another. The woman on the left had just left the adult industry. She said she had made enough money and had perfected her avatar enough to be happy with what she had, and had just quit most of her escort/stripper jobs. She showed me a full model Star Trek ship that she was working on with another group and her money now. The girl on the right, however, had just rezzed a few weeks back, and had just gotten a few jobs started as a stripper/escort. They both answered my questions without any hesitation. And in case anyone may impune my character because I interviewed a few strippers, I definitely found them at stores. Nowhere else.

I definitely barged into this guy's house and gave him my story. He was really taken aback at first, but warmed up once I handed him my notecard. He ended up being a pretty nice guy (although I'm pretty sure he moonlights as a pimp...but who doesn't in SL?).

6.
I have been thinking about something for awhile. I consider myself to be a studious person, and I generally do the work I am assigned on time and I usually get decent grades on it. However, I can't help but think that I have been grotesquely negligent on this journal. I ran through a few of the reasons in my head: I switched to Linux in the middle of the semester and Second Life gave me all kinds of hell for it (making me switch back to Windows at least until the end of the school year). I also have had problems with the wikispaces interface (I still can't get the spell check to work correctly). However, the most blatant and obvious reason that my journal has been under par is that our project does not really lend itself to journaling.

When I would do interviews, I would find a lot of stuff that I would like to write down and put into the journal. However, I felt nervous about it. In our notecard, we made the statement that their answers would be kept confidential. While I understand that we are not revealing the answers to their survey, including their avatar picture in any way or a description of what they were doing made me feel very uncomfortable to the point of not doing much journaling. This has to do with problems in our research design, I think.

If I had this project to do over, I would include within the confidentiality agreement a statement that says that we would like to take a picture of them and then I would include another question asking if they wouldn't mind if we used the picture for our research. Also, I would be more up front about what the project was about and how we were conducting our project via wiki. I think if this had taken place, this journal would have been a lot more effective and full. Alas, it isn't like that. =7.= I just completed the research paper and included the 10 photos from SL. One of the things I realized: I look like a total perv. I have three pictures of strippers, and one guy I found inside a strip club. I am not a total perv. I found all 4 of these individuals using the method laid out in Journal Entry 4--they were all alone and I just figured I could interview them without causing a ruckus. Sex Culture is just so pervasive inside Second Life that it is entirely unavoidable. Just thought I'd throw that in there.