As part of one of my summer graduate courses, I need to research an important social issue. For my project, I decided to research video games, but I need some help.

I need some volunteers to take a survey/inventory that measures how you use your imagination. The survey will take about 15 minutes and you can do the whole thing on-line.

If you are interested, you can find the Short Imaginal Processes Inventory at
<a href="http://www.kism.net/survey/inventory.htm" target="_blank">http://www.kism.net/survey/inventory.htm </a>

If you give me your e-mail address, I can send you your results.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[edited to correct spelling]

[ 07-22-2003, 12:15 AM: Message edited by: Father Bronze ]

Took the test. here's my addy.

j-krete@zonnet.nl

what does that have to do with video games?

Done - make of it what you will [img]smile.gif[/img]

Edit : No need to send me any results. In my daydreams I am a well adjusted positive individual with no guilt or persecution complexes. I have no interest in knowing if this is wrong :D

[ 07-20-2003, 10:48 AM: Message edited by: Davros ]

I am guessing what the survey is for, will save my guess til you email results so as not to cont. survey field, and ,...uh....what was I doing?

sorry, off to shave the cat! right-o! everybody; left, right, left, right..repeat as necessary... :D

I don't care about my results. But I would be interested in knowing about the study, its rationale and what you expect to find. And what the end results are! Did you make up this questionnaire yourself FB?

Man! I wish I could get my participants online like this! ;)

LOL I'm finally finished the survey - it took me about twice as long as recommended because I kept getting distracted and flitting back and forth between web pages... [img]graemlins/uhoh1.gif[/img] I think it's obvious what I put for the distractability items :D

Done and done, I really am baffled at what so many different worded questions coming to the same conclusion is supposed to mean...

Done. [img]smile.gif[/img]

The point of those is to make sure people aren't just choosing at random. Research based on questionnaire-type evidence is fraught with many problems, which have to be controlled for. Some people want to deliberately ruin research, even if they are voluntary participants, so just pick answers at random which are meaningless and destroy real patterns in the data. If you have a number of questions asking the same thing and negatively worded (ie one time you say 'are you easily distractable', another time 'do you find it easy to focus on one task' - in each case a high answer means a different thing - someone answering all 4s would be picked up) you can check later that people have answered in a consistent fashion, and throw out data that has been confounded like this.

That doesn't help people lying for other reasons of course, for example it may be socially desirable to say that you're not distractable at all so regardless of what how distractable you really are, you consistently say you're not on all questions tapping that, but there are other methods to control for that.

Hope I was helpful. I look forward to knowing more about this research, so I left my email.

Done. I suspect most RPG'ers that can spend hours at a time on games will not be easily distracted. Baldur's Gate is not for people with ADHD.

<font color=skyblue>You got me.</font>

done... I'd like to see your compiled statistical data too once you're done if that's available... ESPECIALLY if you're getting data from a non-gaming control group (which I imagine you must be... otherwise these results would be of little value).

perhaps, that is why I ind it hard to complete bg? because it is sooo long, and other things like my books, and the tv, and my poetry keep me distracted

Done the test as well, although at times I felt I was contradicting myself in some ways, depends on how you read/interpret the questions.

wpickrell2@comcast.net

[img]smile.gif[/img]

Heh, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to do surveys (love them!) :D

I'm also looking forward to seeing the results [img]smile.gif[/img]

Thank you all for all of the support.

My class requires me to study some important social issue.

I was looking up different surveys I could use and I found this one about imagination. I e-mailed the Yale Professor who holds the copyrights to the survey and he gave me permission to use the study in any way that would help my research.

Good point Thoran.

My wife who is pursuing a Master's Degree in Statistics made the same point. I'm hoping that the test has already been normed against a control group, but otherwise I'll be looking for non-gamers to take the survey too.

Know any non-gamers who'd be interested in taking the survey?

Just a note:

You don't need to leave your e-mail in this post if you don't want to.
If you accurately filled in the e-mail box on the survey form, I have your e-mail address on your results.

Thanks again,

Who ever developed this survey put one hell of alot of thought into it and I can't wait to se the results they should be very interesting!

<font color=orange>If you need some non-gamers for a control group, let me know. I'm sure I could get some for you. Just e-mail me.

Oh... I took the test too.

Later!!!
</font>

Thanks for the offer, but I managed to find the "Normalized T-Scores" in the documentation that comes with the survey. I don't exactly know what "Normalized T-Scores" are, but my wife said that they were good enough to provide control group data. I'm so lucky to have a Statistician in the house. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Done - hope this helps ya..

BK

Good point Thoran.

My wife who is pursuing a Master's Degree in Statistics made the same point. I'm hoping that the test has already been normed against a control group, but otherwise I'll be looking for non-gamers to take the survey too.

Know any non-gamers who'd be interested in taking the survey? </font>[/QUOTE]Well I'm sure there's volumes on how to get a decent control for statistical studies... but in this case I'd suggest mailing surveys to random households in a region covering roughly the same area as the respondents. If you solicit online for a control, you'll be skewing your control group based on the fact that they're online... to obtain a truly population representational sample you need to go snail mail. Even then you'll have to discuss in your results the several problems inherent in gathering data by these methods and any techniques employed to mitigate those issues.

MS in Statistics... YUK! [img]smile.gif[/img] , I hated those classes more than spinach. I'd rather take Fluid Dynamics, Quantum Physics, and EM Fields and Waves all in the same semester than take one more statistics class. I'm working on my MS in Engineering Management, so thankfully statistics is an avoidable area of study. :D

Just took it for you! Hope it helps! I'd love to see the final results for the whole research project as well. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Good luck!

Ah, i remember about a year or two ago when i was soliciting people to help me with my postgraduate research. In the cintinued spirit of i-would-have-been-screwed-if-nobody-had-helped-me-so-i-will-help-you-to-repay-my-karmic-debt, i have taken the test ;)

I would appreciate knowing my results, and the general results too, of course. Mainly just to see how consistent the answers I gave actually turned out to be [img]smile.gif[/img]

Test taken. I put my e-mail in the survey. Good to see you around Father Bronze

Consider though that his experimental group are online - their results may be different to gamers who are not online. It might be more appropriate to have a comparison group that is online - either both are online, or neither. You have to make sure in a study like this that your control group and experimental group are equal in every way except the manipulation, in this case whether they're gamers or not. Otherwise your results are open to confounding from other variables - that is, you can't draw any conclusions because effects might be due to other variables not the one you have manipulated. There may be something about being online that affects your daydreaming that not being online does not. A good idea if you had the time would be to get a group of gamers offline and a group of non-gamers offline (or use the control data) and compare to see if there are substantial differences between your online and offline samples. If there are, then your results for the online sample aren't generalisable to the population.

I agree though that you'll need to consider what getting data online like you have means for your results. While it's unlikely that people would lie about their age and so on simply because they're online, it is a fundamentally different way of finding participants than, for instance, stopping people in shopping centres where you can see them. It's also important to whether your sample is representative of the population. If they are random and aren't systematically different from the population, then results from them are generalisable. If being online means they will be systematically different from non-online people, then you can only say your results are valid for people who are online.

Your normalised t-scores would simply the scores of a random sample from the population that the test was normed on, that is, tested on to see what the 'average' responses were and what the normal population of scores is. In the population, there will be people who score high and score low, with most people scoring around the average. The idea of your study then, is to see whether the mean for gamers is significantly higher or lower than the mean for the population.

I spared you the vote FB ;) Good to see you and you shouldn't worry so much about other people's views... :rolleyes:

I filled it out, but I don't see what playing video games has to do wiht my daydreaming...

*starts day dreaming about flying over a city and blowing up all those who challange him with his super technological powers*

Very good observations. Luckily, this project is just one aspect of my summer course in The Social Foundations of Education. It's not for my thesis. Maybe some day I will make a more thorough examination of the variables and create a publishable paper. For now, I'm just trying to get an "A" in my class.

Done! That was an interesting little survey

Very good observations. Luckily, this project is just one aspect of my summer course in The Social Foundations of Education. It's not for my thesis. Maybe some day I will make a more thorough examination of the variables and create a publishable paper. For now, I'm just trying to get an "A" in my class. </font>[/QUOTE]Yes that is a good point, it's important to know what you're trying to discover... do you want to know how computer gamers stack up against the average public (use a broad control), do you want to know how computer gamers stack up against the online computing public (use an online control). IMO these would both be interesting comparisons, although a general public control would be more interesting to me, since there's on average going to be more differentiation there.

Okay. Think that's it. Althogh I had this daydream thta I didn't... :D

I filled it out FB! I'll send you some more info in the next few days!! I've just been busy the last week working and stuff..

Done. Good luck.

[ 07-23-2003, 04:55 PM: Message edited by: MILAMBER ]