This thread was approved by GM Cade, and CM Minea. Thanks to you both and also GM Nuova for passing it along.

Thesis Title:
Causes, Magnitude and Implications of Griefing in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games

Hello,

My name is Leigh Achterbosch and I am a candidate for PhD at the University of Ballarat, Australia. I am inviting you to participate in a study about the act of griefing and its implications in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). This is one of many invitations posted on various MMORPG and online game forums.
This research will explore the following questions; what are the causes and implications of griefing in MMORPGs, and what magnitude of griefing exists in this genre? The intention is to contribute new research and knowledge about griefing and its sociological impact.

The study will involve an online survey for participants of the ages 16 and above. This survey will cover your experiences as someone that has performed griefing, been subjected to griefing, or as a witness to the acts of griefing.

You are invited to participate by following the link <removed> and completing the questionnaire that will take approximately 20 minutes of your time (You can save and reload unfinished surveys should you require). You will remain anonymous by completing this survey. The online survey will remain open until an appropriate sample size is collected. I will repost here when the survey has closed. At some point in the future when data has been collated and analysed I will repost with some preliminary results in this forum thread.

I would like to thank you up front for any time you allocate towards this research endeavour. Feel free to spread this survey link around! :)

EDIT: SURVEY HAS NOW CLOSED, THANK YOU.

Completed the survey. :)

The questions were interesting and well written. The results will be fascinating!

We are all great candidates to take the survey, help a fellow gamer out by taking the survey!

Done!

Hope it helps :)

Appreciate it!!!

Done and done :)

I would really like to help you out with this, but when will people learn to make surveys short and senisble? After about 20-30 minutes I was at about 50% complete and hit the 'exit and clear' button. Way too many questions. I have been an MMO player for over 10 years, I have been a victim of and witness to tons of griefing. I would be happy to help you out but when you started digging into 'what was the intensity of the greifing you witnessed...' now you are just dragging things out, and that was only the half-way point. At that point I really wanted to start skipping the redundant questions, but they were set as mandatory.

Good luck with your survey, but I think you could have left out at least 50% of these questions. You would have gotten more feedback that way, including mine.

Survey complete. A rather interesting and well thought out survey. I hope you get some good findings.

Quote: Vobe on 06/08/2012, 09:35 AM - view

I understand, you have a great point. Unfortunately a PhD requires a substantial contribution to the field of choice, and therefore I had to get as much data as possible from this survey, a small survey wouldn't have cut it. If you decide to reconsider you can save and reload your work in progress answers at any time during the survey.

I have completed your survey. Thank you for your contribution to the gaming community.

Being a fellow Aussie, thought I'd help you out and did up one for you.

Will be interesting to see the results and how they all relate to each other.

Lol @ person claiming to take 30 minutes. It doesn't and even if it did this is a PhD he is going for so needs good information (especially on a topic that many people would see as irrelivant/unworthy of a PhD due to not understanding MMO's and their social aspects/networks).

Best of luck mate.