An Explorative Study on the Virtual World: Investigating the Avatar Gender and Avatar Age Differences in their Social Interactions for Help-Seeking

Yulei Gavin Zhang (), Mandy Yan Dang () and Hsinchun Chen ()
Additional contact information
Yulei Gavin Zhang: Northern Arizona University
Mandy Yan Dang: Northern Arizona University
Hsinchun Chen: Northern Arizona University

Information Systems Frontiers, 2020, vol. 22, issue 4, No 9, 925 pages

Abstract: Abstract This study investigates avatars’ gender and age differences in their help-seeking interactions in virtual worlds. Specifically, we conducted data collections from two popular help-supporting regions from Second Life, and performed two levels of analyses. We first examined the existence of the overall gender and age differences, and then compared and tested the detailed differences by creating three types of interaction networks based on avatar gender and avatar age, respectively. Overall, we found that the interaction networks of the same gender tended to be more centralized than the interaction networks with mixed genders. In addition, the interaction networks of the same age group tended to be more centralized than the interaction networks with mixed ages. We also found that old-aged avatars had significantly higher values than young-aged avatars in all measurement dimensions, indicating that old-aged avatars played more important roles in help-seeking interactions.

Keywords: Virtual worlds; Second life; Social interactions; Avatar gender differences; Avatar age differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10796-019-09904-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:infosf:v:22:y:2020:i:4:d:10.1007_s10796-019-09904-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10796

DOI: 10.1007/s10796-019-09904-2

Access Statistics for this article

Information Systems Frontiers is currently edited by Ram Ramesh and Raghav Rao

More articles in Information Systems Frontiers from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().