What is your motivation?
Greetings foldit gamers!
We are three students from the institute of informatics at the University of Oslo (Norway) who are conducting a small study about scientific games. We are particularly interested in exploring the motivating factor for playing these games. If you are a foldit gamer, could you please help us by completing this short survey? It takes approximately 5 mins. We hope you will participate - many many thanks!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFJwaExVSEtjVDFhSThsRUVOc2U1OEE6MQ
We will in the spirit of science share the report for you all to see what we find out.
You can find our contact information in the survey.
http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/_files_nhmrc/publications/attachments/e72.pdf
Page 8
What is human research?
Human research is conducted with or about people, or their data or tissue. Human participation in research is therefore to be understood broadly, to include the involvement of human beings through:
• taking part in surveys, interviews or focus groups;
• undergoing psychological, physiological or medical testing or treatment;
• being observed by researchers;
• researchers having access to their personal documents or other materials;
• the collection and use of their body organs, tissues or fluids (eg skin, blood, urine, saliva, hair, bones, tumour and other biopsy specimens) or their exhaled breath;
• access to their information (in individually identifiable, re-identifiable or non-identifiable form) as part of an existing published or unpublished source or database.
We have been in contact with the developers of the game and have shared the results with them. They thought the answers that came in was very interesting and they will make a blog post about the survey results :)
You can view the pdf here: http://fold.it/portal/files/Survey%20Summary.pdf
or click on the attachment at the bottom of the first post.
Not expected that so many womens there :)
Sad that so low response.
Forum was unavailable for a long time until just recently. People probably don't look here much anymore.
…after all, the sample size is 32. That means a margin of error of 18% in either direction even if the sample is truly random.
The quantitative data is not relevant, and probably not a good representation of who plays Foldit. Who participated is not random, most of the answers are from forum readers and from the people in the chat room at a particular time.
What was most interesting was the answers to the question "Why do you play this game?". The results showed that very many was playing because it's a fun way to contribute to increased scientific knowledge. My personal favorite answer was: "To propel humanity into new dimensions".
