Since I am already an insider in the sub-culture I wished to study, I decide that interviews would prove to be the best way for me to acquire some additional insight into how members of the sub-culture perceive themselves, how they believe others perceive them, how outsiders perceive them and how that perception changes when they are introduced to the sub-culture.
In order to learn what the answers were, I decided to approach it from two different perspective. First I interviewed two people who had never played a role-playing game and had little or no contact with the sub-culture. Following this interview I introduced them to the sub-culture, first by having them observe a game being played and eventually by having them play in the game over the course of a number of weeks, after which I would interview them again to see how their perceptions had changed. The second approach was to interview two different members of the subculture in order to understand their perspective. I feel that by observing and interviewing a smaller number of people I could focus my attention more readily and develop what I believe to be a fairly reasonable representation of all sets of perceptions.
Additional research was done through participant observation of all four members of the study as they played a role-playing game and interacted with other gamers (the game was physically located in a game store which offers free space for gamers to play in) and through email conversations with other gamers both privately and through message boards.