The ‘gamification’ of research:
benefits and challenges
Presenter: Dr Dawn Watkins, Leicester Law School
Law in Children’s Lives Project
• ESRC funded
transformative research
• Multi-disciplinary project
team
• Dr Dawn Watkins (Law)
• Dr Effie Law (Computer
sciences)
• Dr Elee Kirk (Museum
studies)
• Dr Joanna Barwick
(Information science)
Overview of this presentation
• Why gaming?
• Benefits and
Challenges:
design and development
data gathering
data analysis
• Future and further
potential
Why use gaming as a research tool?
• Previous research has shown that children have
misunderstandings of law and legal terminology
• Focus on children and their everyday lives
• 20 million people of age 6-64 population (or 42%)
play games
• The game bracket with the most players is the 6-10
year old group (UK Interactive Entertainment, 2016)
Design and development
• Research ethics approval
• Participatory approach
• Worked with focus groups to develop the game
e.g. the central character ‘Lex’
Design and development
• Interdisciplinary team
• Interaction with game developers
• Digital ‘game’ in the form of a ‘native’ app
Game design: fictional world
Game design: scenarios
Game design: question format
Game design: question format
Game rewards: Building an alien pet
Benefits & challenges
Child participation at design stage - relevance and
comprehension
Time-consuming and challenging to organise
Interdisciplinarity produces a lot of great ideas!
Challenging to ‘translate’ legal issues into non-legal
terms
Game developers bring everything ‘to life’
Can be problems with communication – especially
with limited budget and timescales
For example
Data gathering
• Participants invited to take part via selected schools’
head teachers.
• Informed, signed consent was obtained from each child's
parent/carer regarding their child's involvement and
children themselves provided their own signed consent
to participate.
• Safeguarding policy was agreed with each school prior to
the commencement of the research.
• To ensure full anonymity, - generation of a ‘cosmic code’
(e.g. XX-1-5-001) that every child entered into the tablet
to start the game.
Data gathering
• Out of 885 children invited to participate, 634 took part.
• The take up rate varied among the schools, but the
overall take up rate was 72%.
• Children played the game in a classroom setting; the
class sizes varying from 15 to 39 children.
• Each child navigated the
game individually,
using a tablet and
headset provided
to them.
Benefits & challenges
The idea of using a game is very appealing to
children and (most) families
Multiple ‘gatekeepers’ to negotiate
Can gather quant. and qual. data quickly and in
large numbers
Does not gather rich qualitative data
Gaming element is motivational – all participants
completed the game
Data analysis
• Dataset designed in such a way that children’s
transcribed audio comments could be read in conjunction
with their quantitative answer for every question.
• Stage One analysis:
• range of basic (e.g. bivariate correlation analysis) and
advanced statistical methods (e.g. multivariate regression
analysis) were used to analyse the quantitative data.
• Thematic approach to qualitative data.
• Equal weight applied to both - integrative strategy
(Bazely, 2006)
Data analysis
• Stage two analysis – recoding of elements of
the qualitative data into quantitative data
• Use of MLwiN multilevel modelling software
(Rasbash et al., 2015)
• Conduct further quantitative analysis of
expanded dataset
• Explore patterns of understanding/ quantify
common characteristics
• Identification of personas?
Benefits & challenges
Capacity building!
Requires broad-ranging data analysis skills
Allows for development of both
understanding and measurement
No ‘follow up’ opportunity
Provides robust evidence base (where none
previously)
Future and further potential
• Engaging research method for working
with children, young people and adults
• Opportunity to gather data from large
groups of participants, in a short time
• Can present complex concepts in
everyday scenarios within a ‘safe
space’
For more information, please email:
[email protected] or
visit www.le.ac.uk/licl