Still, it’s been a long and productive summer and I’d like to think most of the dog days are past.  It is almost relaxing to settle in to the hectic pace of school for one more semester.  The past few months have seen the submission of three journal articles as well as a conference paper and poster presentation.  Everything’s still under review, so cross your fingers!  They (and their brief summaries) are:

• Leadership Research in Video Games (co-author) — A review and discussion of leadership research in serious games.
• Mandatory Items in an Internet Survey – Empirical study of online survey completion rates.  Contrary to the literature, the surveys with mandatory items had higher overall completion rates than the surveys with optional items.
• Personality and Workplace Communication Media – A study of media use & preference with personality as the primary predictor.  The interactions between conscientiousness and agreeableness turned out to be particularly fascinating.
• Choosing a Channel: Personality, Gender, and Age as Predictors of Media Richness Preference in Adult Interpersonal Communication (second author) — In this study, men preferred richer media (e.g., FTF) and some interesting gender/personality interactions cropped up.
• Self-Efficacy as a Predictor of Workplace Technology Use (co-author) — Both generalized self-efficacy (GSE) and domain-specific self-efficacy (DSE) were considered as predictors of technology use.  The importance of self-efficacy is supposed to fade as users gain more experience, but DSE did significantly predict use and GSE approached significance even among experience users.

What’s in store for the future?  A few irons are in the fire and should be kicking off in the next few weeks.  We’ll probably be looking for a new team of UCI research interns soon.  In particular, I expect a lot of qualitative document coding (text & A/V) coming our way within about a month.  You’ll be kept in the loop!

Thommas Molina, Valrox, & Yoshimuri Torban were on the team that had the highest per person ore yield in the experimental session.  They split 150 million isk (the EVE Online currency)

War chylde and Aero089 each received 15 million isk in the individual lottery drawing of people who completed the pretest.

Mester Dominux, Alekseyev Karrde, croxis, & Mister Murphy split 60 million isk as the winners of the team lottery drawing (teams that completed the entire study).

Congratulations to these participants and a big thanks to those who didn’t win but still provided significant contributions by participating!

I am part of a team examining individual personality and media preference.  We are trying to get a wide range of responses across age, gender, and culture.  The survey should take about 10-15 minutes of your time and this version is intended for English-speaking adults (18+).  Contact me if you are interested in the Korean language version.

Second: the EVE Online leadership study (the one with the speed mining contest), is officially completed.  As soon as I have had a chance to crunch the numbers, I will announce the teams that won the big isk prize.  Stay tuned!

Third: I just got back from the SIOP annual conference.  I had a great time and met a lot of great people!  Anyone who is looking for a copy of the paper I presented should click on “My Academia.edu Page” on the right of the page and then go to “Papers“.  Or download it directly.  Thanks for your interest!

We currently work with a small team of undergraduates at UC Irvine to help them develop their own research skills as they prepare for graduate study.  However, we are open to partnerships with other schools.  If you are interested, head over to Digital-Lab.org and contact Josh or myself.

Though there’s nothing of substance available quite yet, the lab site is located at http://www.digital-lab.org