A Design for Researching Virtual Worlds - Opportunities and Limitations

Second Life is a virtual world where users, known as residents, can interact socially and commercially. Its population is growing at 20% per month and each day sees around 500,000 real American dollars change hands between them. Worlds such as Second Life represent extreme versions of the sort of web-based knowledge sharing communities that have been studied in information management literature. We can imagine that these communities will become more ‘Second Life-like’ in the future. The authors are running a project examining antisocial behaviour in Second Life, which uses both qualitative and quantitative methods. This paper critically examines our method, concentrating on the focus group. It first assesses some privacy concerns that had to be resolved at the beginning of the project, then describes our approach to setting up and running a focus group. It finishes with a discussion of opportunities and limitations of researching ‘in world’.