Coming of Age in Second Life: Chap. 3
This chapter dealt with how one would gather research and explore Secondlife if they were gathering research themselves. The author uses a lot of his own examples to describe how he got his information for his book. One of Boellstroff main points he talks about is that when conducting research online you have to think about it in terms of virtual worlds compared to the real world. He says he does this by only conducting his research with participants who knows he is researching and only gets his research in Secondlife, not any real life people or people who created the SecongLife site. Boellstroff also talks about how people, knowing of his research, were more than willing to participate.
Also, the author talks about the different types of research he gathered which were formal and informal, these two types produced a lot of information. Such interviews allowed people to talk about their virtual lives and talk about their finding and aspects about Secondlife. ther things that are important in conducting research is the ethics involved and making sure it is confidential and the person knows whats going on.
Overall, I found this chapter to be very helpful considering that my group is doing our project on interviews. I feel that by informing people of the interview before you talk with them will make it a lot easier to find subjects and not people trying to be social. I think for the purpose of this project the interviews I will be conducting will be informal considering that I only need to ask a few questions. I also think it is important to be respecting to the interviewee and be confidential because this is a place where they are comfortable being someone else and it is litterly their second life and I would not want to jeopardize that. Know this the virutal world is differnt than the real world regarding Second Life makes it easier for me in how I am going to go about conducing interviews based on what Boellstroff said.