IMGAME: Granada Fieldwork

Last week (19-24 Feb) we were in Granada for another week of IMGAME fieldwork. As ever, thanks must go to our Local Organiser, Adolfo Calatrava, and the two student helpers, Ignacio and Carolina, at the University of Granada for making the week very successful and very enjoyable.

The fieldwork topic was sexuality and, in particular, the extent to which straight participants can pass as gay. We used the new designthat was first trialled in Uppsala in which generating questions, pretender answers and then judgements are done as three separate stages rather than within single, real-time Imitation Games. The procedures are getting more efficient and our week’s work in Granada enabled us to collect data in two different conditions:

• In the first condition, pretenders (i.e. straight males) had to pretend to be gay but were allowed to use the internet to research answers. We recruited just over 80 participants to this stage of the research who each answered one of 13 different sets of questions generated on the first day of fieldwork. This data should be directly comparable to that collected in Uppsala, where pretenders were also allowed to use the internet.

• In the second condition, the pretenders (again straight males) had to pretend to be gay but were not allowed to use the internet but had to base their answers on whatever knowledge they had when they arrived. As with the first condition, each of the 80 or so participants answered one set of questions from the same set of 13. This answers, and the judgements they give rise to will be directly comparable to the other condition and will give us an important insight into the effect of using the internet on the outcome of the research.

We have now assembled the questions, non-pretender answers and pretender answers into the 175 unique dialogs and are now in the process of sending these out to judges. We hope to report the results – both the Granada/Uppsala comparison and the with/without internet comparison – at SEESHOP6 in June.