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@colorado.edu> Reply-To: air-l@aoir.org To: air-l@aoir.org Cc: Li Nan <Nan.Li-1@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@colorado.edu http://comm.colorado.edu/mjackson

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**************** Dmitri Williams Ph.D. Candidate University of Michigan Department of Communication Studies dcwillia@umich.edu http://www.umich.edu/~dcwillia