[Air-l] IRB permissions for online gaming studies?

[Dmitri Williams]

Michele,

I am just finishing up a dissertation that involved both participant 
observation and survey waves for those kind of online gamers, and I can 
add a little on the IRB process. In a nutshell, it was a right pain, 
but doable.

As you know, the crux of the matter was whether or not I would be 
exposing subjects to potentially harmful or socially objectionable 
materials without parental consent. There is no honest way to avoid 
either, especially since the research involves finding out if the stuff 
is harmful in the first place. Compounding the problem was the 
inability to easily verify the age of the subjects if the study is all 
online. I did in fact mail my subjects stimulus materials, but since 
there was no in-person contact even via snail mail, there was no true 
way to be sure the subjects were of age or had indeed secured consent.

Still, probably the biggest obstacle was the IRB's own unfamiliarity 
with the medium and the genre. They really did not understand what an 
MMRPG was, and  I had to brief them on it. What I think sold them was 
telling them that the game is not in fact dominated by 13-year olds, 
and is instead largely adult-populated. After telling them that and 
agreeing to their language for a consent statement, they let me go 
ahead. True to form, my final sample turned out to be only about 4% 
under 18 years old.

The only other thing I had to promise was to self-identify when doing 
the participant observation part. That element might be skirted 
honestly by having a readily available profile with researcher 
disclosure and a link to a supporting web page. After all, it messes up 
the flow of the work to constantly remind other players that one is a 
grad student examining them: Hey, let's go attack that creature, and by 
the way, I'm a grad student collecting data on you . . .

Cheers,

Dmitri


> Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 10:55:48 -0600
> From: Michele Jackson <Michele.Jackson at colorado.edu>
> Reply-To: air-l at aoir.org
> To: air-l at aoir.org
> Cc: Li Nan <Nan.Li-1 at colorado.edu>
> Subject: [Air-l] IRB permissions for online gaming studies?
>
> Hello - I have a student conducting a thesis on the communicative 
> behavior
> in online games (one will be a U.S. game such as Everquest and another 
> will
> be a Chinese game).  She would like to conduct participant 
> observation. We
> are having difficulties with our IRB (Committee that approves research 
> on
> Human Subjects), primarily because players may be children.  Research 
> that
> involves children requires parental consent. Another problem is that 
> the IRB
> at my university does not have experience with this type of research, 
> and so
> they don't have models to draw on (or to guide us).
>
> I am interested in hearing from anyone who has been able to gain 
> approval
> for this type of research - your help is much appreciated -
>
> mj
>
> Michele H. Jackson, PhD
> Dept of Communication University of Colorado
> Boulder, CO  80309-0270
> 303-492-8139     jackson at colorado.edu
> http://comm.colorado.edu/mjackson
>
>
>
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****************
Dmitri Williams
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Michigan
Department of Communication Studies
dcwillia at umich.edu
http://www.umich.edu/~dcwillia