Preliminary Data Collections on User Opinions About Virtual Advisors

Having reviewed what are the current practices and future trends in six popular application domains of the virtual world, the study continues to uncover what users think about the provision of virtual advisors. This is because the ultimate purpose of having virtual advisors is to serve the users. To ensure the current study is grounded in a thorough understanding of user requirements, semi-structured and in-depth interviews were conducted. Appendix I shows the interview protocol. Purposeful sampling was utilised. Interviewees included 34 avatars across various spaces in Second Life and Active Worlds. These two virtual worlds were chosen because of their high popularity. The project team talked to 42 respondents in total, with eight responses unable to be interpreted, either due to English language insufficiency or the participant encountered technical issues with their network or computers. 34 is deemed as an appropriate number due to data saturation (Guest et al. 2006). Respondents had diverse cultural backgrounds including American, Australian, British, Chinese, Egyptian, Hungarian, Italian, Indian, Japanese, German, Portuguese and Russian with ages ranging from 20 to 56 years old (15 males and 19 females). Each interview took approximately 30–50 min. Interviews were recorded and then transcribed. Open, axial and selective coding methods were used to analyse the data (Glaser and Strauss 1967). Then the various coding categories were screened, with data relevant to the research context being selected through expert review.