Lessons from Recruiting Second Life Users with Chronic Medical Conditions: Applications for Health Communications

Abstract

Second Life (SL) is a virtual world with a number of venues for social interaction. SL integrates various aspects of a user’s social life through activities which span both health and non-health related topics. Users visit SL largely for social interaction, entertainment and play, which makes it a powerful platform for health communications as health messages can be integrated in an alternate venue. As part of a larger project, we conducted an online survey of SL users who self-identified as having diabetes, chronic pain, HIV + status or cancer. Lessons learned from recruiting users with these conditions can be used to develop and disseminate health communications in SL.

An examination of the equivalency of self-report measures obtained from crowdsourced versus undergraduate student samples

“…A number of the studies conducted have tended to focus on examining the unique characteristics of SL participants (Hooi & Cho, 2014;McLeod, Liu, & Axline 2014), the behavior of SL avatars in virtual worlds (Grinberg, Careaga, Mehl, & O'Connor, 2014;Hooi & Cho, 2013), the use of SL for online instruction within educational institutions (Halvorson, Ewing, & Windisch, 2011;Inman, Wright, & Hartman, 2010), or the feasibility of conducting social experiments and experimental manipulations in SL (Greiner, Caravella, & Roth, 2014;Lee, 2014;Tawa, Negrón, Suyemoto, & Carter, 2015). A handful of studies have used SL as a tool for recruitment, though generally the recruitment goals are directed at specific populations (Keelan et al, 2015;Swicegood & Haque 2015). Thus, SL provides a unique platform for conducting certain types of research and may be useful for researching specific populations, but its usefulness as a recruitment platform, relative to MTurk, may be limited.…”

“…Future studies may improve the recruitment approach by investing in paid advertisements that increase an event's visibility in SL's advertising network or through underexplored venues. Recently, for example, Swicegood and Haque (2015) successfully recruited nearly 1/3 of their participants through an SL BNew World Notes^blog page.…”

Efectividad de un modelo de portafolio en el rendimiento del ECOE virtual

“…Hay varias herramientas y opciones de un sistema de gestión del aprendizaje que podrían usarse para el aprendizaje en línea sincrónico y asincrónico (Baig et al, 2020;McLaughlin & Brame, 2020) .También hay herramientas de redes sociales simples y fáciles de usar, que han demostrado su eficacia como herramientas educativas en educación médica (Raiman et al, 2017;Sutherland & Jalali, 2017) .La evaluación del dominio psicomotor es uno de las tareas más desafiantes en casos de aprendizaje en línea/a distancia. Sin embargo, la evaluación del razonamiento clínico se puede realizar utilizando estaciones virtuales de ECOE y mundos virtuales de juego como SecondLife (Swicegood & Haque, 2015). Los pacientes virtuales también pueden proporcionar muchas formas diferentes de evaluar el rendimiento de los estudiantes (Padilha et al, 2019).…”

Curriculum delivery in Medical Education during an emergency: A guide based on the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Assessment of the psychomotor domain is one of the most challenging in cases of online/distance learning. However, assessment of clinical reasoning can be done using virtual Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) stations and game worlds such as SecondLife ( Swicegood and Haque, 2015 ). Virtual patients can also provide many different ways to assess student performance ( Padilha et al , 2019 ).…”