- Check the place you are going to do your interview before you start to do the interview. (Assure your audio, where you are going to sit, surrounding sound…)
- Which avatar you are going to use can also influence your interview results. People react differently when they see different avatars.
- SAVE YOUR CHAT LOG! Even if you are doing your research in voice chat, recording your research processes is important. (In the preferences, under communication, loggings options, and choose save a log of local chat on my computer. Of course you should let your interviewee know that you are recording the chat log.)
- IM or local chat. It really depends. If the interviewee does not want to present, IM is good. Most people when they are face-to-face in SL would rather use local chat for communication.
- Local chat (text) will have the typing motion and sound. It is good and bad at the same time. We can understand the interviewee is typing when we are using the local chat. If the researcher can type out all the questions before the interview and only paste the questions during the interview, it will be much easier and faster for both researcher and interviewee.
- If you are using a local chat, do not turn off your typing animation. Some users cannot understand you are typing or not when you spend a longer time on typing.
- WAIT. Give the interviewee some more time to think and type/talk. Do not paste your next question too fast. Interviewees will not feel respected.
- Voice chat also can choose local chat or IM chat. The good thing about local chat is you can see the green lines on the top of the head, which shows whether the interviewee is talking or not. IM will only show the green lines in a small window when people are talking.
- It will be better if you can also record your screen when you are doing the interview. (Also, you need to tell your interviewee about that too). Taking snapshots is too noisy and disturbing without set up the Quiet Snapshots to Disk during the interview time.
- To video record the screen, the free software such as “Camstudio” or “Taksi” is very easy to use for this kind of event; however, video recording takes lots of memory. It will be better to restart the recording every 10 minutes.
InAEA 