Hey everybody,
I have another specific question I figured I'd throw out there, more so to see if anybody had any better suggestions as to how to go about things. At the moment I'm about finished categorizing and coding responses to questions about behavior and behavioral intuitions during gameplay, and I was having trouble finding information about how to determine what exactly constituted a significant type of response. (See below for example) Now, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted to throw out some arbitrary percentage (like 10 or 15 percent of the sample) because it would allow me to include responses that positively related to real world military experience, which would lend itself to the initial abductive inference I made, but I feel like that's wrong on so many levels, and so to prevent that kind of bias on my part I've decided to use the square root of the sample size as my minimum threshold for consideration and further analysis. So in the example, a category of response would need a minimum five total responses to be considered.
I know this is probably a really, really basic issue, and there's probably a perfectly good answer for this that I'm simply missing, which is why I'm asking you all for help. They just don't teach this stuff in English departments (which one day I hope to change), and I'd rather ask for help and produce a good (if not successful) study than shoot in the dark to try and prove my inference "right."
Thanks in advance for any help everybody. I really do appreciate it.
Here's the example question. I modified the totals and the sample size for posterity.:
Question: In the game setting I perceive enemy combatants as being real (n=29).
Responses:
Just a game/ not real (19)
It felt real (10)
Mentioned specific real life Army reference - positively related (3)
Mixed emotions about the matter (3)
Mentioned unique enemy actions/unique enemy interactions(3)
Roleplay/Treated enemies as real even though they’re not (2)
Felt more real as I got older (1)
It felt real but I don’t know why (1)
Games let us experiment in Virtual environment (1)
Game 2 feels "more real" than game 1 (1)
Mentioned specific real life Army reference – did not relate to it (1)
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