Full paper

http://www.cyberpsyke.org/cyberpsyke/media/SLSURVEYVERSION%205.4.1.pdf

General Psychological Engagement finding:  

The Psychological Engagement model in virtual communities is form by elemental types of engagement: Emotional engagement, behavioral engagement, perceptual engagement. (Ortiz de Gortari, A, 2007) 

Emotional engagement – It is personal investment, compromise and active participation in an intrinsically and extrinsically rewarding activity which may provoke varying levels of physiological arousal impacting cognition and perception which in return alter individual affective state, mood and potentially belief.   

• An Emotional Engagement item that was more frequently present in the total population was feeling “worried or excited about the events that have or will happened in SL”.  Most SL users, at some point, are anticipating events in SL, in positive ways, with feelings like excitement, or in negative ways, with worry (often/always 23.6%, sometimes 41.4%).
• They also report finding themselves “spending more and more time in SL” (often/always 26.9%, sometimes 46%), which may indicate a subjective perception or desire to participate increasingly in SL activities.
•  A notable portion of the population report they “feel restless if they cannot log in to SL” (always/often 20.2%, sometimes 33.6%).  Similar results were found in marketing research conducted by Global Market Insite.  High concurrency of these variables as autonomous measures may revel the inter-dependency people face today as members of a digital society, where technology is not only a medium for work and communication, but also for socialization, entertainment, recreation, and self-discovery.
• Also, players “use SL to escape from real life problems” (always/often 14%, sometimes 40.3%).
• we found that half the population “has been thinking about SL and losing focus in other real life activities” at some point (12% often/always, 37% sometimes) and forty percent reported that SL is “the only thing they find interesting” at least some of the time (11.4% often/always, 29.5% sometimes).
• Approximately one-third of the population expressed that “SL is definitely better than their real life” (9.1% often/always, 25% sometimes), that they “wake up thinking about SL” (often/always 9.1%, sometimes 28.8%),
• User “keep logging into SL even when feeling frustrated or angry with SL” (always/often 8.8% and sometimes 26.8%) at least sometimes.
•  To a lesser degree users “feel frustrated or depress when they compare their real life with SL” (often/always 5.5%, sometimes 16.9%)

  Behavioral engagement - It refers to repetitive patterns of behavior over a period of time, and where the frequency, quantity and duration of such behavior become habitual. 

• There was a major concentration of respondents that invests 10 to 6 hours per week (20.4%). The 63.1% invest 20 hrs or less per week and the 36.8% invest 21 hrs or more per week.
• There was a relatively even distribution of the number of logins per day, with a slight concentration in those who logged in only one time per day: 1x (38.1%), 2x (30.3%), > 3x (31.7%)
• The majority of users logged in for 3 hours or under for each session (68.5%), although there was a clear concentration of individuals who remained logged in between 1 and 3 hours per session: < 1 Hour (10.7%), 1 – 3 hours (57.8%), 3 – 5 hours (21.5%), > 5 hours (10.1%)

 Perceptual Engagement is the interplay between an environment which provides stimuli to the user and their capacity for acquiring involvement without possessing conceptual awareness of their immersion, and where conscious intentionality takes a secondary role to a generalized dissociative experience sustained by environmental sensory input (e.g. telepresence, losing sense of time, trance state, avatar identification, social presences)

• We found that most SL users have experienced a sense of losing track of time at some point (always/often 28.4%, sometimes 46.6%), as well as experiencing trance state (79%), telepresences (45%), the feeling of SL being “real”, an interpersonal awareness of the presence of others (53.4%), and emotional reactions to other avatars (57.8%). But we didn’t found that people that were engage present significant more trance state. What we found it that people that is engage in SL more frequently tend to lost track of time.

 Second Life impact in real life activitiesWe didn’t find any remarkable index of conflict with regard to the integration of virtual activities with other offline activities in most of the population, but we found that engaged people usually present a higher frequency of ‘self-neglect (often/always 13.2% vs.1%), more neglect school or work (often/always  7.2 vs. 0%), neglect relationships (often/always  4.6% vs. 0%), and usually lie in order to connect to SL (often/always  6.25% vs. 0%). So even though rates are not predominant, we found a substantial correlation with engagement that may increase with higher levels of engagement.