DESCRIPTION
[Trigger Warning: This project deals with death and war in a fictious setting.]
This project is based on a previous bachelor project involving three students and may be in partial collaboration with a Canadian game development studio (Foolish Mortals Inc.). The setup of the study will involve creation of an engaging narrative in which the participants will have to imagine themselves in the role of a military commander. In this project we’ll be investigation how personality factors such as empathy and situational influences (e.g., transportability) shape the content of fictional letters being written to the family of the deceased soldiers. This project involves two (!) students working together, albeit with a separate focus.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The study may include additional data directly from the an existing game (e.g., a corpus of letters taken from the game for comparison) or questionnaires. Each RQ will be given to one student as their focus point, however all students will be analyzing the letter contents. RQs may be altered and can potentially be adapted.
RQ 1: Does the level of empathy (as a personality factor) influence the content or the extent of the letters written?
RQ 2: Does the level of transportability influence the content or the extent of the letters written?
Other variables such as moral disengagement may be considered as well.
Letters will be coded depending on the content and richness. They will be analyzed to explore the influence of the relationship towards that soldier (i.e., was the soldier commanded by the participant or not) or the influence of details about the soldiers death on the letter content.
RESEARCH METHOD
Preparation: Creation of an engaging narrative and creation of vignettes for several soldiers that died.
Data acquisition: Data acquisition in form of a survey via Qualtrics.
DATA-ANALYSIS
Data analysis will be both qualitative and quantitative.
Qualitative Data: Foremost obtained from the letters written to the family of the deceased soldier as well as responses to open questions in questionnaires All participating students are expected to analyze this data. Different software may be employed depending on the situation ranging from Atlas, NVIVO to Excel.
Quantitative Data: In the form of questionnaire data and potential values extracted from letters. Each student is expected to analyze the data corresponding to their research question but encouraged to look at the other data as well. The data of this study will be analyzed in R.
INFORMATION
Please contact Lynn Weiher (l.weiher@utwente.nl) when you are interested in this assignment. The assignment is open to two students.
LITERATURE
Intro into thematic analysis: Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77-101.
Moral Disengagement: Hartmann, T., Krakowiak, K. M., & Tsay-Vogel, M. (2014). How violent video games communicate violence: A literature review and content analysis of moral disengagement factors. Communication monographs, 81(3), 310-332.
Empathy: Cuff, B. M., Brown, S. J., Taylor, L., & Howat, D. J. (2016). Empathy: A review of the concept. Emotion review, 8(2), 144-153.
Narratives and Transportability: Bowey, J. T., & Mandryk, R. L. (2017, October). Those are not the stories you are looking for: Using text prototypes to evaluate game narratives early. In Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (pp. 265-276).
A recent article on the combination of qualitative and quantitative data: Friehs, M. A., Klarkowski, M., Frommel, J., Phillips, C., & Mandryk, R. L. (2022). Enhanced Esports: Community Perspectives on Performance Enhancers in Competitive Gaming. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(CHI PLAY), 1-29.