Yasser Khazaal*, Department of Mental Health and Psychiatry, Geneva University Hospitals, Switzerland, Geneva, Switzerland Mathias Van-Singer, Geneva University, Geneva, Switzerland Anne Chatton, Geneva University Hospitals, Geneva, Switzerland Track: Research Presentation Topic: Web 2.0 approaches for clinical practice, clinical research, quality monitoring Presentation Type: Poster presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Last modified: 2014-09-01

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Background: One of the major concerns of online surveys is that the recruitment of participants is based on self-selection.
Objectives: To test the representativeness of a self-selected sample of World of Warcraft (WoW) online gamers
Methods: Avatars of the gamers were compared on the basis of their percentage of achievements in the game. Two self-selected samples from previous on-line studied were compared with a randomly selected sample of active avatars.
Results: The analyses included 762 avatars from the self-selected samples and 478 from the random sample. The self-selected samples of avatars had higher scores than the random one on most of the assessed variables.
Conclusions:The results suggest that players more involved in the game may be more likely to participate in online surveys. Caution is needed in the interpretation of studies based on online surveys that used a self-selection recruitment procedure.