How do you lead?

Hey folks,

I have a 5-10 minute survey studying leadership behaviors among MMORPG players and would greatly appreciate your participation if you are 18 or older. No personal or identifying information is being collected.

I am a graduate student in industrial & organizational psychology (and a long time gamer) and one of my research interests is leadership. I would like to see what links there might be between game and real world leadership.

The first page of the survey link has more information about the study as well as contact info if you have any questions.

Thanks for your help!

EDIT: This survey is now offline. I'll post results ASAP. Big thanks to everyone who was able to help out!

interesting survey, took it.. i think you shoudl have included an option for just a normal guildmember who isn't an officer or the leader. thats my only thought about the survey.

goodluck with your reseach too.

I'll take a look, after all im studing psychology too. ><

Nice one
Keep us posted on the results

filled

good luck

The software yelled at me! QQ

Interesting topic, giving it a shot now =]

Nice survey, though some of it is a bit... odd in consideration to what the questions are relating to.

Also, some of them don't totally apply to those of us in very small guilds.

Interesting topic. (and an impressively thorough ethics disclaimer at the start ^^)

I need to know before filling it out, though, whether we're being questioned about in-game activities/responses ONLY or whether the questions are meant to apply to our lives in general?

Like, for instance: "I talk about my most important values and beliefs" - does that apply to values and beliefs in general? Or specific in-game, guildwars-related values and beliefs? 'Cos, y'know, I wouldn't start discussing my real-life morals or religion or anything, but I would maybe discuss specific in-game values like how exactly a team should work together in a gvg or something...y'know?

It's just not very clear atm

Interesting...a bit complex for your target audience.

asking whether we "re-examine critical assumptions" kind of made me tilt my head to the side for a second. Remember...a lot of gamers aren't that smart or have ADD of some form or another. Simplicity is the key

i got to question 7 or 8 and lost interest...your questions were too veg for me

For some of the questions I don't think you had an answer that could apply to some people.

And yeah, though I actually do a lot of that stuff, I still think you made it a bit more complex than need be.

Thanks to those who have had a chance to fill it out!

I appreciate the comments and agree that some of the questions are tough to apply. Unfortunately it's a balancing act. I'm using measures from the literature so I can better compare the results to prior findings, but as a result it can be generic/odd at times.

Sorry for the ambiguity! There is one block of questions that ask about the MMORPG specifically and after you complete that chunk, you'll see the same set of questions again. The second time you'll be instructed to answer them for work (or school, if you don't work). These two chunks of questions make up the bulk of the survey, so it's all downhill after you fill them out.

Why do people keep thinking that surveying gaming forums will yield useful results?

If you put stats in your reports, no one will check the source.

Also, this survey is completely ridiculous:


Answer: I get drunk and complain loudly in vent that no one is blinding this hammer warrior. Sometimes I sing bad 80s songs as a motivational technique.

No idea because someone would answer the same question differently depending on how it is asked. Only n00bs tend to take polls and follow them too closely.


BTW, I play with H/H and don't have a guild so I'm anything but a leader.

Really, these kinds of polls should be taken by those over the age of 18-ish. It's likely that a large majority of those here are fairly young and won't understand/care about the meanings of these questions, and will likely just start clicking, which could very likely lead to skewing your results.

Age is an insignificant factor compared to the fact that it's an online survey posted to probably several gaming sites, the participants are self-selecting forumgoers, and the questions are biased towards a particular type of leader.

Also, a significant portion of the forumgoers are 18+. That doesn't mean they act mature though. (Additionally, those that complain about a particular age group tend to be just a year or two older than said age group.)

Self selection isn't as bad as you might think, depending on the topic. On a forum, you're likely to get hardcore gaming nerds rather than the mythical casual gamer. The people leading guilds are mostly the hardcore nerds, so you're cool there, and your data isn't useless.

The problem with this survey is completely irrelevant questions. They read like some of the gibberish you find on communications major resumes (no offense to any of you). Considering that MMORPG leadership is much less strict than business relationships, it's just not applicable.

Naturally, I clicked "sometimes" on everything on the first page, then quit.

It's quite an assumption to think that players leading guilds are hardcore nerds, and that the hardcore nerds on Guru are representative of anything.