[MUD-Dev] Personality Types (was Anarchy Online (wasCommunity Feeling))

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

John Hopson wrote:

> Um, I'm not sure this is a good objection.  Basically, you're
> saying that redundant questions make it harder to mislead the
> test.  Which is, as I understand it, part of the point of asking
> redundant questions.  If we're building a survey to accurately
> judge how people think about online gaming, we want it to be hard
> to cheat.

I don't think you would use a survey to accurately judge that.  What
you judge is whatever the respondent found to be passable among the
options you provided.  That is fairly shallow!  So, it basically
only makes sense to make such a thing if you think that you already
know how people think and have some questions, which are really easy
to answer, that can somehow shed some light on some particular
aspects of your "hypothesis".

> And as you said, it lets us get an idea of how "hard" their
> opinions are.  We don't necessarily want players to be rock solid
> consistent, we want a clear picture of what the player thinks.

Which the typical quantitative approach never will give you.  What
you get is tendencies in a population. (If you control the sample,
then it can tell you that the AO and EQ populations exhibit certain
differences) If you want more you most likely will have to ask each
player yourself, makes sense even for closed questions.

What is a person supposed to do when he is faced with 100 questions
a web page, think deeply about each question?  Dream on :).  I think
there is something about the web situation which suggest a rather
small set of questions, preferably some mix of open and closed
questions.  You still want some control questions, but perhaps only
on a few select issues, and of course the respondent should not be
aware of the control question...  Well, I know next to nothing about
this, but the web seems to have a particularly nasty dynamic.

  (And of course, the moment the person who answer the questions
  realize that he will get an outcome depending on his answers, then
  you no longer have any reason to believe that you collect answers
  to the questions themselves.)

--
Ola  -  http://www.notam.uio.no/~olagr/

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