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A true enhancement of persona through ethnography
I described several state of the art techniques of information architects to create an usable and useful information systems. The common practice is to combine different methods to minimize the downsides of a single approach. Nevertheless, I also mentioned in section 2 that two aspects are neglected and that these could be addressed by applying ethnography: avoiding mixing personal cultural background and the system’s environment as well as neglecting the user’s language.

I suggest enhancing the persona technique by ethnographic information to have a more complete image of the setting available. This “ethnographic persona” would include

• typical quotations and native terms as well as
• a taxonomy of native terms, which describe the processes and activities in native language.

This type of persona considers the cultural and lingual background of our persona(s). It would help to understand our persona deeper in terms of their cultural understanding and view of their world much better. Information architects and designers could derive ideas to create a proper navigation concept, content and functionalities based on the native language / jargon / slang.

This type of persona is a true improvement to the old concept, which based on identifying personas, tracking them and testing IA-techniques as try & error procedure. This asks for a high amount of data to be analyzed.

In this sense, I would argue like Spradley (1979) who says that the ethnographic description is a translation, but must lead the reader from the native concepts and meanings to the particular cultural scene, not to the concepts developed by the ethnographer. Along these lines, information architects should use these personas to translate them into a native information architecture.

The downside of this method is the needful time effort (as general in ethnography). Consequently, such a method is only interesting for project with a budget and time for a (several) month(s)-long ethnographic project.

Links:

• Introduction to the article
• References

Case studies
One of the most valuable and appreciated effects of ethnographic methods within information system design are their depth of data and insight (Myers, 1999, 5): “Ethnography often leads the researcher to question what we ‘take for granted”. But the downside of ethnographic analysis is that it takes much longer than many are willing to accept / to invest. As a consequence, we can find two types of ethnographic approaches to information systems: first, a research related approach, which is mainly conducted by PhD candidates (or other scientific personnel) during their studies, or second, a shorter efficiency related approach performed by consultants.

Robertson (2005) describes his holistic approach as needs analysis, which actually includes workplace observation, contextual inquiries and staff / stakeholder interviews among other methods. Interestingly, Robertson reduces workplace observation to a ‘junior role’ preparing the path to other methods: “In general, workplace observation is a good way to provide a broader context for more detailed research, such as one-on-one interviews or contextual inquiry.” As an example, observation of police officers in the office “would provide few opportunities to gain a deeper understanding of activities, issues and needs” because officers would spend the “majority of their time in Word, on email or using the phone.” Combined with contextual inquiry, Robertson sees the value of needs analysis of research “at identifying issues with currently-available information sources and tools”.

This type of method application is a good example of the efficiency related approach. It doesn’t try to analyse cultural aspects or the language, instead it takes the researchers background (Information Architect, and therefore how a system must be designed to work ‘perfectly’) and fills it up with applicable data gathered from the field.

Rose, Shneiderman and Plaisant (1995) propose a general framework based on ethnographic research to “reduce the likelihood of some common problems, such as overlooking important information and misinterpreting observations” (p. 115). The framework consists of 4 areas (preparation, field study, analysis and reporting) and serves as a guideline to projects when ethnographic methods are applied. But the case study, which was provided by the authors and explained their framework, showed a minimal use of ethnographic methods. Unfortunately, ethnography is seen by the authors as a set of new methods to gather qualitative and quantitative data, but within a typical “design approach”. The framework itself is a project pathway and is not very specific in how findings should be communicated to the design team.

A step further goes a suggestion from Hughes, O’Brien, Rodden and Rouncefield (1997). They propose a presentation framework that separates the work fields of ethnographers and designers and helps to communicate between the two groups. This said, the addressed problem is the form of communication of the ethnographer’s findings to the designer. In contrary to Robertson, we see here a split of tasks: ethnographers perform an ethnographic study, and designers do the information system design. Where design wants to reduce complexity through abstraction, ethnography wants to enrich the overall picture by details. Therefore, the suggested framework is a guideline how to present ethnographic data reduced to core concepts and key elements.

The authors of this framework suggest three dimensions of description: distributed coordination (work tasks in the context of division of labour), plans and procedures (organisational aspects of cooperation) as well as awareness of work (presenting the work of others). As I don’t want to go too much into the details here, one aspect is striking: the absence of language as important input for the design process. In my opinion, the framework could be extended to include this dimension, as the data (interviews, observations and other records from the research field) is available. The authors present extracts of interviews, emails and other documents that provide a rich semantic source for further exploitation and use in form of a domain analysis. But as the authors stress, “the framework is fundamentally motivated by the demands of design” (p. 148).

A final approach I want to highlight here is made by Simonsen and Kensing (1998). The authors present the role of ethnography in participatory design. Participatory design describes techniques that aim at “establishing a meaningful cooperation between designers and users” (p. 23). As Hughes, Robertson and others, Kensing and Simonsen use participant observation among other techniques to collect valuable data for the design process. As both authors are designers and not ethnographers, they see some value to exploit from the new method. But their approach is limited as well to the point, where it comes to face the information architects bias and the language used in the researched culture (corporation, group, …). The main idea of the authors here is to integrate users and designers (with some ethnographic know-how) into one team “to conduct an analysis and codesign an artifact” (p. 24).

Ethnographic descriptions for designers
As shown in the previous cases, many authors prefer a co-operating team of ethnographers and designers to create ‘better’ information architecture solutions. Unfortunately, only a few (Hughes, Simmonsen and others) tell how this relationship should work in detail. It is assumed that the ethnographers provide an ethnographic description to the designers as a cultural template for final realization of an information project. The question is: what is the content?

Spradley (1979) presents a spectrum of ethnographic presentations: from ethnocentric descriptions to ethnographic novels and many in between. The difference among them is their use of language, or better: the use of language of a specific culture. Ethnocentric descriptions on the one side of the spectrum neglect native language and even ignore what things mean. On the other side, ethnographic novels are written by natives themselves, composed in a “foreign” language and from an insider’s point of view including subtle meanings to things.

So, what does this mean at all? The point is, that the product of an ethnographic study is always a verbal description of something, mostly a culture or society or a group of people. Verbal description includes language, and most of time, the description is composed in the author’s language or in the language of his / her readers (here: designer). As the author’s language is different from the observed cultural scene, how can the ethnographer provide a genuine description? In fact, the author must translate meaning from one culture to another, and this is the case with ethnographic studies for information projects too.

The spectrum of ethnographical description as shown in the illustration is the result of different approaches how to describe an unfamiliar cultural scene. The ethnographic description is vague and offers easy understandable stereotypes, but doesn’t touch the heart and soul of an ethnographic description. In fact, it resembles a description of a focus group or a market segment.

Social science descriptions also use stereotypes to describe groups and do not reflect any cultural knowledge, whereas standard ethnographies employ sometimes-native languages to describe a cultural fact. The base of the description is still the author’s own cultural background and concepts.

Monolingual ethnographies and life histories are almost descriptions of a culture in its own terms, giving a way to the cultural scene members to describe ‘them’. The ethnographer will then translate the original description into a language he/she understands.

At the far end of the spectrum, ethnographic novels mark the most intense form of incorporating alien culture norms, objects and language into an ethnographic description. They are composed by natives and very rich in descriptions. And: they use the language spoken in the community.

Illustration: Types of ethnographic descriptions (Spradley, 1979, 22)

It seems obvious that there are many possibilities in what form a team of designers will receive an ethnographic description. My argument here is that a) designers need a compact translation of a culture due to time and resource restrictions instead of a lengthy dense description, and b) the translation needs to take the small meanings and details of a cultural scene into account to be effective.

This demands are quite ambivalent first, but important. Designers may learn about ethnographic methods, but they are designers first. It is good to know about the restrictions and the advantages of a method, and therefore useful for their cooperation with ethnographer. But as the ethnographers don’t design information objects, and it’s a benefit when they know about the possibilities there, they focus on their speciality. So should designers. Ethnographers should provide a description that is useful to and used by the designers when constructing their information project. But what designers need from ethnographers, is a new sort of ethnographic description.

Links:

• Introduction to the article
• Next section (section 4)
• References

Ethnographers use a wide selection of methods for their research. Many of them are also used by other scientific disciplines. I will describe the main ethnographical methods in detail in the next paragraphs.

Participant observation
Participant observation is one of the two core methods of ethnography to collect qualitative socio-cultural data from a certain cultural environment. Cultural environments can be abroad (another country somewhere in the world) or they can be within the same society, but forming a distinct circle of cultural values and norms (sub-culture). From an ethnographic point of view, it is important to collect data about these cultures, values, norms, rules, the language used, to understand them comprehensively.

Roland Girtler (2001) talks about the “adventure” of sociological (ethnographical) research to leave the researcher’s office and to study his objects live and personally. He and Michael Agar (1996), among many others, argue that it is important for the research to participate in the world of the researched subjects and culture, and that the main method is to observe what these subjects do and how do they do it.

Ethnography is a holistic research method that doesn’t present single properties of social systems but a “complete” image of related social phenomena. Participant observations help to achieve this ideal of a complete image and are mainly based on fieldwork that asks for the researcher’s participation in the daily life of the observed culture. This includes observing what goes on, taking pictures, recording and following conversations, taking field notes in a research diary, and collecting other data that could help to describe and explain the research question (Hammersley / Atkinson, 1986) and providing a triangulation of them.

Ethnographic interview
The main argument for using ethnographical methods in research is to analyze unstructured data without a pre-defined theory first. The researcher is open to group and to conclude schemas and patterns, to re-evaluate them immediately in the field and to proceed to results, which are grounded. Regarding many socio-cultural research projects, there are no appropriate or existing theories. In this case, researchers try to find so-called rich points (Agar, 1996) first. Rich points are terms and actions, which are not understood by the researcher because of his different cultural background (e.g. South Indian villagers place a small lump of charcoal on top of lunch packages before leaving the village for another town. Obviously, there is a rich point for westerners to be explained “why?”). To understand the idea behind these rich points, the researcher must seek for explanations directly from the involved people and check them against other data found to model coherence. This is where the ethnographic interview is so valuable: an explanation will not be possible only through observation.

The final outcome of ethnography, which can be described as continuous trying, falsifying and modifying process of available data within a schema (explanative context or knowledge structure), is to generate a stable hypothesis based on the many schemas identified and explained. As a second outcome, this rich data set (and therefore the described schemas) can be linked to existing theories in related fields of research.

The ethnographic interview is a systematic approach to solve socio-cultural unknowns and mysteria. As described by Spradley (1979), the main stages of such an endeavour are to identify key informants, and then interview them using different kind of questions (descriptive, structural, contrast, componential), analyzing the language of the key informants, and finally discovering so-called cultural themes (topics of socio-cultural importance to the research environment), before ending up writing an ethnography.

Methods of virtual ethnography
This type of methods is partly related to the interview, but mainly focuses on the analysis of media, media content, ego-documents (see further below) and other forms of written or multi-media sources. The main difference to all other methods is the explicit relation toward digital media or virtual objects such synthetic worlds, avatars and websites. As such artefacts have a meaning in a culture, there are valuable to the ethnographer. But because of the nature of these cultures and their environment, some old methods must be considered and applied under new circumstances (Hine, 2000).

One example is the analysis of media content. Websites may be changed continuously, by many co-authors, they can tell stories spread through many different websites and connect a network of distant people and organizations. Hence, another problematic aspect of virtual ethnography is the authenticity of interview partners and the reliability of collected data  Virtual ethnography is not only useful to understand modern societies, but also to discover new forms of culture – like the synthetic worlds.

Additional methods, also used by other scientists
Beside the described methods, virtual ethnographers will collect additional data using a variety of methods known and applied in sciences like anthropology, history, or other culture-related disciplines. Most of them have their focus in the past, and therefore field work means here to research in archives of all sort. The direct contact to individuals as presented in the two first ethnographical methods is not possible (or rare like in contemporary oral history). As a consequence, these methods will produce a different quality of data. Göttsch & Lehmann (2007) cover many of these methods (see below) in their book in a substantial way.

Typically, ethnographers may use the following additional methods for their research:

• Use and interpretation of archival sources (see also Kramer, 1968) is a standard method in history. Sources can be anything from meeting points to inventory lists. An interesting aspect is the so-called ego-document. In ego-documents, a subject reports about him-/herself. A modern variant of ego-documents are blogs and other media where statements are made online about oneself.
• A sort of an ego-document (Dekker, 2002) are travel-reports and diaries, which are used to gather information about subjects or the culture which is described by the author.
• Use and interpretation of material objects (see also Gerndt, 1981) is a relatively new aspect of historic and even ethnographic research. The underlying theory is that cultural life consists of cultural objects, for example. Therefore they can be understood as indicators of cultural processes.
• Research of different kinds of folklore, that is narratives, fairy tales, jokes, and mythologies, can be used to interpret the present everyday-history and culture.
• Empirical research of organizational culture in industrial and services sectors is another way to collect important data for the analysis of collective identity and values. The focus here is to learn more about the norms and values cultivated within an organisation.
• Individual memories as a centrepiece to a method called analysis of consciousness (“Bewußtseinsanalyse”) are used to recall the personal history, the history of their milieu and to interpret history from a subjective point of view. The preferred method is to interview people and ask them to recount historical events and artefacts.
• Related to the interpretation of material objects are methods that research the application and use of media and media content. Media is culture and therefore relevant for ethnographic research projects.

Although this list of methods and sources relevant for ethnographic research is not complete, it gives an overview about the diversity of methodical aspects of socio-cultural anthropology.

Domain analysis including taxonomy of alien culture
In the first lines of this section I promised not to go into details with ethnographic methods. But at this point, I have to make an exception though: an introduction into domain analysis and the construction of taxonomy of alien culture. This is important as language is a core piece of ethnography (see next section) and we need to understand a culture (through her linguistics) before we start we can draw any conclusions.

Domain analysis as proposed by Spradley (1979) is a systematic approach to test folk domains through interviewing informants. Domains are built upon a large number of cover and included terms. At the beginning it is difficult to say what term belong to what domain, so the ethnographer will research their semantic relationships and discover the culture’s principles how symbols are organized into domains. The further apart the cultural background of the ethnographer and the analyzed cultural scene are, the more will the researcher looks at semantic relationships first. A domain analysis consists of several steps looking thoroughly into language. The objective is to gain deep understanding of alien cultural domains, and the result will be a list of (hypothesized) domains. These domains will be tested again and completed.

The next step in an ethnographic project would be to focus on very few domains to be researched deeply or to do a surface analysis. This is due to the lack of time and other resources ethnographers have and also the vast task of researching all domains. In the most cases, ethnographers study a few domains in depth, and also get some surface understanding of a cultural scene (which would be similar when conducting ethnography during an information project). Once a domain is selected to be researched in depth, a taxonomy analysis will follow. A taxonomy shows all relationships among all terms in a domain. It’s a more precise analysis of the language, building a hierarchical structure of folk terms. It will finally lead to a cultural meaning system (Spradley, 1979, p, 142) that can be used at a later stage of an information project.

Links:

• Introduction to the article
• Next section (section 3)
• References

Information architecture: ways to find what you’re looking for
The so-called user of information systems is dependent on the design of the application in order to perform the desired actions. One, but not the only one, function of information systems is generally to inform about something. Due to the immense amount of information stored in information systems, designers and/or information architects have developed different solutions to help the user what she is looking for.

In non-digital information systems like books, users are offered a table of content and for academic literature also a reference list as well as an index of terms and other persons mentioned within the text. In a digital environment, such concepts are used widely because they’re simple: sitemaps are a very good example of popular digital tables of content.

Another parallel between non-digital and digital information systems are categories and keywords. For example, libraries use(d) systems called catalogues, which stored meta-information on single cards. The physical storage system may be a cabinet or box, but the information system itself relied on classification and taxonomies. Every single information entity is registered within a library-specific system of classes and terms, which mostly follows nation-wide standards. By contrast, digital information systems use databases to store meta-information and categories to cluster information objects to groups. Newer concepts like tagging (adding one or more tags of semantic significance to an information object, mostly performed by the user of an information system; see also Alby, 2007) deploy the same principle: scan for meta-information prior to search for the specific information object.

Additionally, there are two navigation options, which are predestined for digital information systems: the search function and browsing. The search function obviously is a feature we only find within digital information systems: we need a sort of a database or other sources with digital content. And the user will need a window to ask for a specific information object. Combined, the search function is a very powerful way to retrieve information, not only from the web, but also within much smaller systems like intranets or library OPACs.

The second navigation option is a feature born with the advent of the Internet: the way single documents (websites) could be linked together by hyperlinks. Once a breakthrough concept, hyperlinks are part of the nature of our digital and online societies. Therefore, browsing (to follow links from site to site) is a very powerful navigation method applied by users where provided. Although large directories of links like Yahoo’s directory are only used and remembered by a slim part of all web users, browsing from a text passage to another document undergoes a kind of revival: usability designers and marketing people discovered that users tend to follow the links “they see” (Eisenberg & Eisenberg, 2005).

Popular design techniques for information projects
Information architects are responsible to plan and wire the presented navigation techniques depending on the purpose, the size and the users of an information system. There may be many other factors that will have an impact on the information system (like security concerns, available budget, project resources like know-how and time, political influence of lobbies, …), but the above mentioned three should be regarded as the most important ones. To conceptualize such navigation features for an information system, information architects use a range of techniques described in the next paragraphs.

One potential way to trigger an information project is to research the processes and available systems within an organization. The so-called information audit is a method, which will collect and later analyse data about information processes within a company or service. The objective is to gain insight into existing information flows, to identify information needs and to avoid information overflow. The result of an information audit is a list of recommendations how to redesign the system as a whole or to improve the performance of single information processes.

Depending on the function of an information system, an information project in the early stages can be influenced by marketing considerations too. Marketing experts bring in their market know-how: their idea of dividing the product market in market segments for better pinpointing existent needs. Focus groups and other market data sources will tell marketing people roughly which group wants what when where and how. Consequently information systems like web sites or digital catalogues will reflect these market segments also in their navigation patterns (see Grotenhoff & Stylianakis, 2002).

Usability tests with users in a test or laboratory scenario are a third approach to construct useful information systems. This method serves to identify needs and skills of future users as well as to find flaws in the information architecture of a prototype or an existing application. This said, usability tests are applied in the early and late stages of information projects, serving different needs of information architects (Krug, 2006).

Usability tests not only check the wire frame of an information system, but also the terminology in use. Classifications and taxonomies must be consistent with the language of the potential users. If this fail, orientation will be difficult and even search functions will not work properly. One method applied by information architects to address this challenge is card sorting, a state-of-the-art technique for many years (Robertson, 2001). Card sorting involves the user (here: test persons) in clustering and naming of information objects and classes.

Before designing paths: Who is ‘the user’?
Where marketing techniques describes anonymous and impersonal “groups” of users, so-called persuasion architects (Eisenberg & Eisenberg, 2005) goes deeper and ask: “Who are the users at all?” The answer is formulated in several personae, representing a type of user, reflecting the characteristics, needs, skills, desires and objectives of a group of people potentially using a specific information system. A persona is presented in a very concrete way, including a name, a picture and some personal details that are important to understand the way users of this persona will operate a certain information system (Pruitt & Adlin, 2006).

This technique is not only an advancement to the described marketing approach of market segments, but also to an important precondition for a successful application of the described design methods like usability testing and classification building. The condition to understand usage of an object is to know the users. Human nature is individualistic, that means that users are not one user type or “the user”, but many users with many different facets of behaviour, intentions, skills and so on. As a mere of thousand different user types is far to complex for information architects to handle, the idea of grouping similar behaviour, skills and intentions into single personae is consequent and comprehensible.

As a trend of the last years, many case studies report about the application of personae or similar techniques that use the idea of ‘user first’ (e.g. Kennedy, 2008).

Links:

• Introduction to the article
• Next section (section 2)
• References

The actual set of methods to build useful and usable information systems neglect a very important part of our world: our language as fundament of our view of the world. The consequences are misleading and difficult to use websites. This is because information architects normally present their world through their language, which are different from the user’s. Conventional information design methods don’t care about this. From an ethnographic point of view, this can be avoided and improved.

Therefore, this paper will be structured the following way: First, I will give a short overview over typical information design methods, navigation solutions as well as their strong and weak aspects.
Second, I will describe in short ethnographical methods as well as how and when they could be applied in an information design project. I will also present reference works of other authors who proposed similar ideas and techniques for ethnographical information design.
Finally, I will formulate my own ideas and possibilities of use of ethnographical techniques, which are not considered yet in the scientific literature.

Links:

• Section 1 - Navigation through digital pages
• Section 2 - Methods applied by Ethnography
• Section 3 - Ethnography and information projects
• Section 4 - Conclusion and outlook
• References

Try it out, I guess there is much more coming.

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In theory and in practice, ethical issues in virtual ethnography are real and widely considered (see previous section). They can be addressed in different ways as the study showed, and there is a common sense of formal ethical issues that must be met to comply with national and university standards.
Professional standards additionally name some of the more difficult and complex “soft ethical issues” that are hard to match and easy to circumnavigate during virtual ethnography (in the sense of neglecting them). Many of them have been named by the participants of the study as well as by Agar (1996) and Girtler (2001) in their books.
Ethical approach for MMORPG research
Based on the facts of the literature review, the ethical standards of universities, standards of associations (AAA, AoIR) and colleagues (see also the survey results), and as consequence of the non-existence of an ethical guideline for virtual ethnography of synthetic worlds, the author suggests an ethical approach specified for MMORPG research:

1. Equality: I will treat all players as players. They are not data suppliers in a technical sense, but they are individuals passing time in their world based on individual motives.
2. Immersion: I will act as a player first, and as a researcher second. There are two reasons to do so – one ethical, one methodological: first, this is the best way not to disturb the social life of a group or the individual perception of their world. Second, the researcher will learn the culture of a group / cultural scene deeper as she participates in their actions and become a member of the group. Participative observation and informant interviews are valid methods but have their limitations in MMORPGs.
3. Transparency: I will disclose my role, my identity and my research to my key informants, but also to all other players who wish to know. This will be done “verbally” (in-game chat) or by linking to a research site. (Online) Informed consent will be sought with key informants, as these individuals will be interviewed at length (and collection of their individual data will arise considerably).
4. Protection, confidentiality and anonymity: I will try to anticipate and avoid any harm to the involved players and store all recorded data (text, images, videos) in a secure digital place. The group names as well as the individual avatar names will be coded (replaced by fictive avatar names) in the original documents. The coding list will be stored offline in a locked folder. Key informants will have the right to choose their alias to be named in a future publication.
5. Participation: I will let participate involved key informants in reviewing my findings and analysis. This is not indented to influence informants to change their behavior, norms, values or other cultural aspects, but to give them the possibility to express their view of the cultural scene they belong to.
6. Responsibility: As a researcher, I will act in a professional manner to secure the image of my research colleagues, my university and my discipline. As a player, I will act according to the End User License Agreement (EULA) of the specific synthetic world.

These six points could serve as a fundament of MMORPG research. As different experts reported (see Hine, 2005), guidelines like these can never cover all potential ethical issues during a month or year long virtual ethnographic study. Therefore, every researcher has to adapt these rules on a single-case basis.

The previous section addressed ethical dilemmas and their (individual, institutional and national) suggestions to solve them. As there are many ideas and recommendations to solve ethical dilemmas in ethnography generally (and even there exist only guidelines, but no true solutions), the researcher must act ethically wisely in all phases of his/her project. This section will ask about the ethical standards applied in MMORPG research.
As outlined, virtual ethnography is a widely used method to gather qualitative data from different online areas for different scientific purposes. Email, chat, discussion boards and websites are popular research areas (see Hine 2005:4), whereas MMORPGs are gaining popularity from the scientific community since mid 2003-4. This said, most of the scientific debate about methods in online research is still about the classic research fields. Additionally, there are no tailored ethical standards especially for MMORPGs.

As a consequence, the author was interested in the application of ethical standards in MMORPG research of practicing researchers and asked them about their use of virtual ethnography, their consideration of ethics in MMORPG research and about established guidelines.

Survey method and response
The base for the survey itself was a list of researchers compiled after reading through literature, websites, weblogs and discussion boards. The list of collected names was far from complete, but includes as much names and addresses as possible that are somehow connected to online research in general.
The autor’s email itself provided a short introduction of his person, his scientific interests, a description of the survey, his request to participate as well as the five survey questions (four of them were open-ended questions).
The survey emails were sent in three waves: a first set of six mails to check for potential questions, misleading sentences or missing information. The second set of 66 mails was sent with minor changes to the introduction. After two weeks and a low response rate, the author decided to address another 28 researchers. This time he included a full informed consent.
The email-based survey received a response rate of 16,0%. In absolute numbers, 16 researchers sent their answered questions back, another 15 (15,0%) denied participation for the following reasons:

• + “no time”
• + “no experience with virtual ethnography”
• + “on maternity leave”

Of the sixteen researchers, twelve are professors or lecturers at universities, four are PhD candidates. The geographical distribution is as follows: USA (6), UK (5), AUS (2), DK (1), CAN (1), SE (1).

Survey questions and results
Question 1

• + Question: “Do you think ethics is an issue with virtual ethnography?”
• + Hypothesis: Online researchers are well aware of ethical issues and consider them as important.
• + Result: All of the 16 responses agreed that ethics is an issue with virtual ethnography.
• + Interpretation: Ethical behavior and comprehension are culture-dependent. Therefore, the result suggests that there is a common sense about the importance of ethics during virtual ethnography projects in North America, Northern Europe and Australia, at this time. With the installation of general ethical guidelines, IRBs and other institutions propagating the importance of ethical standards in these countries, the result is no surprise.

Question 2

• + Question: “What kind of typical ethical dilemmas do you can imagine can occur during virtual ethnography?”
• + Hypothesis: Online researchers with a sense for ethical issues will be able to list many and unique ethical issues that can occur.
• + Results: In total, the author learned about twelve potential fields of ethical issues. Eight issues of total twelve were named by a maximum three of the sixteen respondents (uniqueness), and two issues by more than 50% (“confidentiality” and “identifying as a researcher”). Only two respondents (12,5%) named just one potential ethical issue, four respondents (25%) named two potential issues, and ten respondents (67,5%) named three or up to seven potential ethical issues within virtual ethnography. The total distribution of the answers can be seen in the diagram:

Table 1: results of question 2: “What kind of typical ethical dilemmas do you can imagine can occur during virtual ethnography?”

• + Interpretation: The results reflect the experience of the respondents in virtual ethnography (and other online research methods) as well as their “ethical conscience” (in the sense of “what can be considered to be an ethical issue?”). There is a variety of understanding what can constitute an ethical issue: named issues with a high percentage (like “to get informed consent”, “confidentiality” and “identifying as researcher”) can also be found in the professional guidelines of the AAA and ASA and are part of many ethical codes (university HS forms e.g.). Very unique responses like “funding dilemmas”, “deception in the name of research”, “in game cheating for research” are minor points in the above mentioned guidelines or even not mentioned. Some issues (with 20% response or 3 identical mentions) like “going native”, “author induced bias”, “research objects are humans, not objects” or “recorded data treatment” are indirectly a part of the mentioned ethical guidelines. As these issues can’t be checked off in a formal way (like “to provide an informed consent”, “to ensure confidentiality” and “to identify oneself as a researcher”), I would call them the “soft ethical issues of virtual ethnography”. “Soft” means here difficult to grasp and to deal with. In contrary, I would call “getting informed consent”, “confidentiality” and “identifying as researcher” “formal ethical issues”.

Question 3

• + Question: “What kind of ethical dilemmas did you experience during one of your virtual ethnography projects?”
• + Hypothesis: In contrary to question 2, where the focus lies on the knowledge about potential ethical traps, question 3 addresses the actual ethical experience. The hypothesis here is that researchers are ethically aware even if they actually didn’t experience any ethical issues during their virtual ethnography studies.
• + Results: Four of the sixteen respondents didn’t have conducted any research using virtual ethnography, so they are taken out at this question. In total, eight different clusters of experienced ethical dilemmas have been named:

Table 2: results of question 3: “What kind of ethical dilemmas did you experience during one of your virtual ethnography projects?”

• + Interpretation: The remaining twelve respondents show an interesting pattern: respondents gave almost the same number of issues in question 2 (potential ethical issues) as in question 3 (experienced ethical issues). The only differences were one respondent (Q2: three issues; Q3: two issues) and the amount of issues in the group of three and more (Question 2). These respondents showed a broad understanding for potential ethical traps, but experienced only 50% of them in their own research.
  Two-third of the respondents said to have had problems to get an informed consent. The high percentage is partly a consequence of the type of ethical issue here: as informed consent is a “formal ethical issue” (according to question 2), there is no way to neglect this. On the other hand, the online media makes it difficult to obtain such permission from everyone affected in the field. The same is true for the other two “formal ethical issues” like “to identify as a researcher” (and not to be deceptive) and “to assure confidentiality” (to avoid any link between real and virtual identities). They show a 33,3% and 58,3% respond rate, which is lower, but also constitutes some problems for researchers.

Question 4

• + Question: “Do you research with the help / under the guidance of an ethical code / standard, and if yes, what kind of?”
• + Hypothesis: With the availability of ethical guides and institutionalized bodies, the author supposed that researchers generally follow them.
• + Results: All but two respondents follow one or several ethical codes proposed by some institution(s). 50% of the respondents follow university ethic standards (which involves also IRBs), slightly more (56%) professional standards (like the code from AoIR, AAA and similar institutions). A total of four respondents follow, additionally, their personal ethic code.

Table 3: results of question 4: “Do you research with the help / under the guidance of an ethical code / standard, and if yes, what kind of?”

• + Interpretation: Thirteen respondents follow national, university or professional ethic codes. All of these codes include formal ethical issues as described above. Interestingly, all sixteen respondents name at least on formal ethical issue in question 2. This suggests that ethical thinking and minimal ethical standards exist also where researchers conduct virtual ethnography without national, university or professional ethic codes.
  The results not only show the actual distribution of ethical guidelines (in the field, not on paper), but also the high level of confidence in professional standards (which are voluntary, in contrary to mandatory national or academic ethic codes). The reason for this phenomenon is the fact that professional associations are better aware of the methodological complexity and needs than an national or university board of scientist that are not familiar enough with new methods like virtual ethnography.

Question 5

• + Question: “How do you solve ethical issues during your online research?”
• + Hypothesis: With the rise of national and university ethic codes and committees, researchers tend to stick to them.
• + Results: 75% of the respondents will stick to their guidelines or contact their ethics board in case of an ethical issue. But 50% will reflect oneself to solve such a situation. 37,5% will also consult their colleagues for an alternative opinion. Singular strategies involve planning ahead to avoid any ethical conflicts (37,5%) as well as to involve the researched population into the plans and solutions (12,5%). Two respondents suggest following the rule “people first, research second”. Six respondents list at least three different ways how they solve ethical issues, in contrary to the other twelve with two or one path(s) to solve these issues.

Table 4: results of question 5: “How do you solve ethical issues during your online research?”

• + Interpretation: the result suggests that ethical guidelines are an important tool for ethically conducted research in general: over 60% use them in case of an ethical issue. This supports the hypothesis that ethical guidelines are not only “paperwork”, but actually used tools. In contrary, 31,25% decide on a case-by-case basis (including self-reflection).

Part 5: Conclusion and ethical approach for MMORPG research - continue here