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Acknowledgments | p. xi |
Foreword | p. xiii |
Why this Handbook? | p. 1 |
Beginnings | p. 1 |
Why ethnographic methods and why virtual worlds? | p. 6 |
Why a handbook? | p. 8 |
An orientation to the virtual worlds we studied | p. 9 |
Three Brief Histories | p. 13 |
A brief history of ethnographic methods | p. 13 |
A brief history of virtual worlds | p. 22 |
A brief history of research on virtual world cultures | p. 25 |
The uses of history | p. 27 |
Ten Myths About Ethnography | p. 29 |
Ethnography is unscientific | p. 30 |
Ethnography is less valid than quantitative research | p. 36 |
Ethnography is simply anecdotal | p. 40 |
Ethnography is undermined by subjectivity | p. 41 |
Ethnography is merely intuitive | p. 42 |
Ethnography is writing about your personal experience | p. 43 |
Ethnographers contaminate fieldsites by their very presence | p. 44 |
Ethnography is the same as grounded theory | p. 45 |
Ethnography is the same as ethnomethodology | p. 46 |
Ethnography will become obsolete | p. 48 |
Research Design and Preparation | p. 52 |
Research questions: emergence, relevance, and personal interest | p. 52 |
Selecting a group or activity to study | p. 57 |
Scope of the fieldsite | p. 59 |
Attending to offline contexts | p. 61 |
Participant Observation in Virtual Worlds | p. 65 |
Participant observation in context | p. 65 |
Participant observation in practice | p. 69 |
Preparing the researching self | p. 72 |
Taking care in initiating relationships with informants | p. 76 |
Making mistakes | p. 79 |
Taking extensive fieldnotes | p. 82 |
Keeping data organized | p. 85 |
Participant observation and ethnographic knowledge | p. 87 |
The timing and duration of participant observation | p. 88 |
The experimenting attitude | p. 90 |
Interviews and Virtual Worlds Research | p. 92 |
The value of interviews in ethnographic research | p. 92 |
Effective interviewing | p. 94 |
The value of group interviews in ethnographic research | p. 104 |
Size, structure, and location for group interviews | p. 106 |
Transcription | p. 110 |
Other Data Collection Methods for Virtual Worlds Research | p. 113 |
Capturing chatlogs | p. 113 |
Capturing screenshots | p. 114 |
Capturing video | p. 116 |
Capturing audio | p. 117 |
Data collection in other online contexts | p. 118 |
Historical and archival research | p. 120 |
Virtual artifacts | p. 121 |
Offline interviews and participant observation | p. 124 |
Using quantitative data | p. 126 |
Ethics | p. 129 |
The principle of care | p. 129 |
Informed consent | p. 131 |
Mitigating institutional and legal risk | p. 135 |
Anonymity | p. 136 |
Deception | p. 142 |
Sex and intimacy | p. 144 |
Doing good and compensation | p. 146 |
Taking leave | p. 148 |
Accurate portrayal | p. 149 |
Human Subjects Clearance and Institutional Review Boards | p. 151 |
Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) | p. 151 |
Preparing a protocol for KB review | p. 153 |
Working with IRBs | p. 155 |
Informed consent and anonymity | p. 156 |
Data Analysis | p. 159 |
Ethnographic data analysis: flexibility and emergence | p. 159 |
Preliminary reflections while in the field | p. 160 |
The role of theory in data analysis | p. 162 |
Beginning data analysis: systematize and thematize | p. 164 |
Working with participant observation data | p. 168 |
Working with individual and group interview data | p. 170 |
Working with images, video, and textual data | p. 172 |
The end of the data analysis phase: from themes to narratives and arguments | p. 174 |
Generalization and comparison | p. 176 |
Writing Up, Presenting, and Publishing Ethnographic Research | p. 182 |
The early stages of writing up: conferences, drafts, blogs | p. 182 |
Written genres | p. 185 |
Dissemination | p. 186 |
The writing process | p. 190 |
A quick trip back to the field? | p. 192 |
Tone, style, and audience | p. 193 |
Conclusion: Arrivals and New Departures | p. 196 |
References | p. 201 |
Index | p. 223 |
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