milla0097

hi! sorry for not getting back to you before!! but during the day I have class and work😖 I will definetly check on him!! Thanks 🥰

Hi everyone, thank you very much for your replies and sorry for joining the conversation just now 😃 Also a special thank you to @Madelaine McMasters for helping me and starting this conversation for me, you are an angel. Your suggestions will surely lead me to do some selection among the RL lands to research and I am definetly going to explore the a bit better. Do you also happen to know the owners of these lands? Like Mother Road (Route 66), Venice, Machu Picchiu, Paris, or any other RL replica? Or do you happen to know somebody who might be in contact with one of them?

Hi and Thank you very much for your reply!! Dutch estate can actually be a good example for my research!! And it seems really beautiful!

Yeah, unfortunately I figure that out too late. Can I then ask you what would be the best way to contact as many active SL users as possible? 🙏

I was aware of the difficulties. However, I also thought that since this forum counts on thousands of subscribers, finding 10-15 people who match my selection criteria wouldn't have been that great of an issue. Would you mind if we move the conversation on a private chat? I sent you a private message before. There are a couple of question that I'd like to ask you, if you have time.

Thank you again for your help and support 🙏

Thank you very much for your reply. I get your concern. To answer your questions ...the destination of Little Santorini has been chosen at the beginning by me and my supervisor due to the great touristic flow that the real destination of Santorini has per year. My intention is to find people who are willing to go through an online interview with me and talk about both their part experiences of Little Santorini and real life destination (even though now I managed to widen the destination options, including all the SL replicas) . I posted in this forum because I noticed a quite high activity among the subscribed users hoping to find someone who could help me. Ps: Your decision of closing Little Santorini does no affect my research in any way

Yes it has to be subsequent to the SL visit

Hello everyone! Sorry for the late reply and thank you all for your comments and interest. However, I believe there must be a misunderstanding. First of all, I am not asking people to travel right now for the sake of my study, but for those who traveled already for personal/vacation reasons. Second, I never said that I was looking for people who purposefully engaged with SL replica to get info about the real place, but just for those people who happened to visit the real place after they had interacted with the SL. I am not looking for any causal pathway between the two destinations, or at least not yet (I know that it sounds non-sense, but there is a reason behind this). Therefore, the perfect participant would be a SL user who simply engaged with the destination while normally playing with the virtual world, and who later ended up visiting the the correspondent real destination for reasons that might or might not be connected to the previous SL experience (the reason in this recruiting phase is not relevant). The reason why I chose to share so little with you about my research is because I don't want to cause any bias in possible participants. But it seems that I didn't express myself properly and I apologize. Also, I'd discussed with my supervisor about the inclusion of the other SL replicas in my study and, due to the current difficulties in finding participants, she grant me the permission. Therefore, whoever experienced both a SL replica and it correspondent real destination is eligible to be a possible candidate for my research. If any of you want to partecipate or want to ask me any question about my study, please don't hesitate to contact me at the following e-mail address: 616296ca@eur.nl . I am sorry, but it is quite difficult for me to keep up with all the messages since I am very busy with my courses during the day. Thank you so much for your time 🙏

Hello to everyone and thank you for your replies. I get your point of you, since studying multiple virtual replicas was part my original idea as well. However, my supervisor suggested to focus just on one destination so to have a clearer line of comparison among the collected testimonies. So for now I'd like to follow this format since I also have limited power over it. Although, I don't completely exclude the possibility to include the other replicas in the future in case I find myself struggling to find enough participants.

Hello everyone! 🙂 I am a student attending a master's degree in Tourism, Culture, and Society at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam (the Netherlands), and I am looking for people who are interested in participating in my thesis project. My research topic is virtual tourism, SecondLife virtual replicas of real touristic destinations, and the development of expectations on actual sites. To conduct my research, I need around 15 participants to undergo an individual online interview with me, which will take approximately 30 minutes. To protect your privacy and maintain your anonymity, a consent form will be sent for you to read and sign before the interview that explains how the gathered data will be treated. The type of participant that would suit this research is a SecondLife user who: visited Little Santorini (SecondLife replica) multiple times engaged with some or most of the touristic or social activities proposed in Little Santorini visited the actual destination of Santorini (real-life island) For the purpose of this study, it is essential that the real-life visit happened after the participant engaged with the SecondLife replica. If you are interested, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me at the following e-mail address: 616296ca@eur.nl Also, if you don't match the criteria but you happen to know other SecondLife forums or group chats, I might ask if you can share this message or send me the name/link of the forum. This would be of great help for me 🙏 Thank you for your attention 😁 So looking forward to working with you!! 🤞