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| Acknowledgments | |
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| Foreword | |
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| Why this Handbook? | |
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| Beginnings | |
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| Why ethnographic methods and why virtual worlds? | |
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| Why a handbook? | |
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| An orientation to the virtual worlds we studied | |
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| Three Brief Histories | |
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| A brief history of ethnographic methods | |
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| A brief history of virtual worlds | |
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| A brief history of research on virtual world cultures | |
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| The uses of history | |
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| Ten Myths About Ethnography | |
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| Ethnography is unscientific | |
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| Ethnography is less valid than quantitative research | |
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| Ethnography is simply anecdotal | |
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| Ethnography is undermined by subjectivity | |
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| Ethnography is merely intuitive | |
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| Ethnography is writing about your personal experience | |
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| Ethnographers contaminate fieldsites by their very presence | |
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| Ethnography is the same as grounded theory | |
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| Ethnography is the same as ethnomethodology | |
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| Ethnography will become obsolete | |
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| Research Design and Preparation | |
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| Research questions: emergence, relevance, and personal interest | |
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| Selecting a group or activity to study | |
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| Scope of the fieldsite | |
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| Attending to offline contexts | |
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| Participant Observation in Virtual Worlds | |
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| Participant observation in context | |
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| Participant observation in practice | |
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| Preparing the researching self | |
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| Taking care in initiating relationships with informants | |
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| Making mistakes | |
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| Taking extensive fieldnotes | |
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| Keeping data organized | |
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| Participant observation and ethnographic knowledge | |
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| The timing and duration of participant observation | |
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| The experimenting attitude | |
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| Interviews and Virtual Worlds Research | |
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| The value of interviews in ethnographic research | |
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| Effective interviewing | |
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| The value of group interviews in ethnographic research | |
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| Size, structure, and location for group interviews | |
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| Transcription | |
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| Other Data Collection Methods for Virtual Worlds Research | |
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| Capturing chatlogs | |
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| Capturing screenshots | |
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| Capturing video | |
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| Capturing audio | |
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| Data collection in other online contexts | |
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| Historical and archival research | |
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| Virtual artifacts | |
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| Offline interviews and participant observation | |
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| Using quantitative data | |
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| Ethics | |
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| The principle of care | |
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| Informed consent | |
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| Mitigating institutional and legal risk | |
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| Anonymity | |
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| Deception | |
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| Sex and intimacy | |
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| Doing good and compensation | |
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| Taking leave | |
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| Accurate portrayal | |
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| Human Subjects Clearance and Institutional Review Boards | |
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| Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) | |
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| Preparing a protocol for KB review | |
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| Working with IRBs | |
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| Informed consent and anonymity | |
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| Data Analysis | |
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| Ethnographic data analysis: flexibility and emergence | |
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| Preliminary reflections while in the field | |
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| The role of theory in data analysis | |
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| Beginning data analysis: systematize and thematize | |
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| Working with participant observation data | |
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| Working with individual and group interview data | |
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| Working with images, video, and textual data | |
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| The end of the data analysis phase: from themes to narratives and arguments | |
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| Generalization and comparison | |
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| Writing Up, Presenting, and Publishing Ethnographic Research | |
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| The early stages of writing up: conferences, drafts, blogs | |
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| Written genres | |
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| Dissemination | |
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| The writing process | |
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| A quick trip back to the field? | |
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| Tone, style, and audience | |
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| Conclusion: Arrivals and New Departures | |
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| References | |
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| Index | |