Call for Participants 2

The Burning Question (and the Answer)

The elephant in question was this: grounded theory means discovering theories from participants via interviews. The researcher asks participants very broad open questions, and they must not go into interviews with any preconceived notions, bias, or clues as to what they will draw out of their interviewees.

So (and this may be where I was missing something): how do I discover the unintended consequences my participants have experienced if I can't ask questions using the words 'unintended' or 'consequences'?

Thank the Lord for PhD supervisors! I told one of mine about my elephant in the room, and he provided the link I had been missing: that while my interview questions will be broad in terms of scope, they will still be linked thematically to the conditions that I am already aware of: the conditions in which some unintended consequences occur. And while the criteria I had co-developed with ChatGPT and used in previous drafts of the survey (which you can read about in Part 1) were useful in terms of ensuring the games that respondents play fitted the study, they were only useful in that sense. 

Secondly, the questions I was asking around the state of flow, problem-solving, wellbeing, and learning something were almost there - as I had sensed - but not quite right. While they were appropriate in the sense that they were framed around player experiences, they needed to be much broader while still opening up the possibility for the conversation to draw out unintended consequences. As a result, Section 4 was re-worded so the questions posed asked:  

1. What is / are your usual reason(s) for playing?

2. Can you describe how you feel after a typical gaming session?

3. What (if any) after-effects from playing the game / games?

4. Have you experienced strong emotional responses from playing? (Closed, Yes/No question. Follow up: If you answered Yes to the above, what were these feelings?

5. Is there any part of the gaming experience that gives you particular satisfaction?

6. Can you describe the extent (if any) that gaming has impacted on your learning?

7. What is your usual reason for playing? 

8. Have you experienced anything you didn't expect when playing? (Closed, Yes/No question. Follow up: If you answered Yes to the above, can you say a little more about the experience?

Final Version

My supervisors have looked at the survey and agree it is, in research terminology 'good to go'.  The next step is approval of the School's ethics committee, and before that, all of the documentation that goes with it. I've also provided an interview schedule, but the nature of my semi-structured interviews means that they are open to change at any moment so can't be quantified, and apparently that makes the application easier to 'sign off'.