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December 04, 2008, 03:30 PM ET
Psychologists Doing Research in Virtual World Pay Subjects in Virtual Money
Richard L. Gilbert, a psychology professor at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, is about to begin a series of surveys of participants in Second Life, the virtual world where people interact as cartoonlike characters in a 3-D animated landscape. Usually the researcher would pay test subjects a small fee for their time, but for this study he’ll be paying participants in Linden dollars, the virtual currency used in Second Life.
He had no idea what the appropriate amount would be, so Mr. Gilbert walked around popular areas of Second Life asking strangers how much he would have to pay them to sit down for an hour and take a survey. “The average of all the responses that I got was $1,000,” he says. That’s 1,000 Linden dollars, worth about $4 in actual U.S. currency. “It’s much cheaper” than what he would have paid subjects in a traditional experiment, he says.
Mr. Gilbert says that two of the surveys — one about addiction to online worlds and another about sexuality in Second Life — just won approval from the university’s institutional review board, which must sign off on research involving human subjects. The project was a harder sell than usual, he says, because the board had not dealt with virtual worlds before. “I had to meet with them and sort of explain what we’re doing,” he says.
When the experiments begin in January, participants will have to visit the university’s new “island” in Second Life to take the surveys. Mr. Gilbert gave me a tour of the university’s island this afternoon, showing off the bank of virtual computers where participants will take the survey. When users click on the computers, they will be taken to a Web site with the survey questions.
Mr. Gilbert (whose virtual character is shown above, in black) says he wants subjects to come to Second Life to take the survey to demonstrate that they are experienced users of virtual worlds. —Jeffrey R. Young
Categories: Virtual-Worlds, Research
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