This started with a little survey to see what kind of people the fandoms consist of. The eventual results of the survey and potential future research will land here. Feel free to contact me at [email protected]
Hi there! Your survey was distributed to my 9-1-1 server not too long ago (which I thoroughly enjoyed, by the way, from taking to reading the results online). I'm actually conducting my own fandom research for school and was wondering, since you were able to cast a pretty wide net of 50 to 60 people, if you'd be willing to distribute my survey as well? I would really appreciate it! Thanks so much!
Hi! I mainly posted the questionnaire into the few discord servers I am a part of (read: 2 servers) and encouraged further distribution. If you are looking for cross-fandom interaction I can check if I can post in those again and aside from those I am super willing to shout it out here (although the following here is relatively small).
Hit me up/comment with the relevant link/info once you have it!
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Just a quick reminder: there is more results to come. I have analysed the hell out of this data because I made it a part of one of my uni projects to do so. That being said it will still be a while until I upload it, because I am still drowning in uni work for other courses.
I have managed to turn analysing the survey to be part of a uni project I have due next month so I finally found time to analyse the basics! I will link to a less colourful and "boring" table view of all of these results in a later post, as I still need to write the code for that part and it's late. For now there is image description on there!
This analysis is based on n=100 people.
Question 1: Where do you mainly read fanfiction?
Unsurprisingly most of us spend a lot of time on AO3, but I think we should pay respect to the three lonely souls who use ff.net, wattpad or tumblr respectively. But how much time are we spending reading on average? Well...
Question 2: How much time do you spent reading fanfiction in a week?
I don't know if I should be concerned that nearly 1/4 of us is spending over 15 hours per week, meaning at least 2 hours a day, reading, but then again I strongly belong into the orange category as well.
Question 3: What fandom(s) do you regularily consume fanfiction from?
I have cut to the top ten of fandoms mentioned, because the list of mentioned fandoms is too long to nicely display in any form. It isn't all that legible already.
Quick switch to bar chart, because the pie chart got too crowded and because this is a multiple choice question so the percentages wouldn't match up. Our top 3 consist of Merlin at 19%, Marvel at 37% and Harry Potter at 71%.
This is the point where I really questioned the data for the first time. I don't know if these percentages are representable for fandom as a whole or if this is a case of a "selffulfilling prophecy". Meaning the channels over which I distributed the questionnaire reached only a specific group of people, namely the Harry Potter and Merlin folks, as I have the most contact to those fandoms, accidentally biasing the data.
Question 4: What ship-category do you read most often?
Funfact: for the first ... 50? 65? entries, F/M wasn't represented at all. We love our gays I guess. Different funfact: there IS the option to choose F/F in the questionnaire. It just wasn't used. Even now there is one (1) lonely soul who picked that option out of 126. (The form is still open so on there I can see more answers than I used in the analysis)
Question 5: What type of fan-content do you create?
This one was a surprise. I didn't think that there were this many people actively creating content, but then again, this might due to the people reached by this questionnaire, so possible bias again. (Top 3: Fanfiction 77%, Fanart 35%, Podfic 9%)
That's it for the fan-related part of the research, let's go on with the neurodiversity and demographic part. Especially for these coming results keep the possibility of a bias in the data in mind.
Question 6: What form of neurodiversity/mental health struggle does apply to you?
This one was the reason this research even exists, and while I haven't yet looked up what percentages of the general society have any of the neurodiversities, I believe that this is rather high, proving my subjective observation: A LOT of the people reading fanfic are neurodiverse in some way. Over half of the participants answered that they have some form of anxiety and/or depression, with some people even leaving me comments how fanfiction is their safe-space, helped them grow and accept themself. This one I will be focussing more on in the future analysis.
Question 7: What is your gender identity?
This as well surprised me to a degree. Even without comparing I know that this is FAR off of the official gender demographics of the general society. Especially the amount of enbies is surprising but nonetheless welcome.
Question 8: Do you consider yourself as part of the LGBTQIA+ community?
(No picture due to the 10 pic limit on posts)
Results:
Yes: 90%
No: 6%
Prefer not to say: 4%
Now, again. A LOT of us are queer as fuck. This is most definitely not the norm in general society and even with a potential bias is significant enough to say that the majority of fanfic-readers are part of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Question 9: If you consider yourself as part of the LGBTQIA+ community, what "part" of the community?
The answers here refer to the orientation differing from hetero or the gender identity differing from cis. Keep in mind that this question was voluntary and therefore not everyone did answer this. Actual percentage might be higher. (I don't know the number of people that answered that question right now but will go into more detail at a later date)
Question 10: How old are you?
Again a voluntary question. But on average the community seems to be in their mid or late twenties, although there are also a bunch of adults over 30 enjoying fanfiction. This graph especially reminded me to not assume anything about people within the community. The other person could be someone in still in school, dealing with their first crush or big exams. It could just as well be someone working full time or someone with kids, someone with grandkids even. Fanfic is and always should be open for people of all ages.
Question 11: Where do you live?
Sadly I haven't been able to reach people in africa or antarctica but oh well. The form is still online, should anyone from there want to add their input into this statistic! ;)
Overall results:
People reading fanfic are a lot more queer, neurodiverse and in general divers than one might expect. I for one was surprised to see how willing people where to answer a stupid online survey that wasn't supposed to lead anywhere.
Thank you to everyone who answered and especially to those that left me nice comments in the form <3
To answer two things that popped up in the comments of the form:
How are you going to analyse the data/What method will you use:
I am not a statistician, nor do I have any formal training in analyzing surveys. I am however an engineer and have therefore taken a lot of math and even stochastic classes. That said, my method will be "Plop the data in to python, write some code and get different results". Throughout that I will talk to friends of mine who are more familiar with analysing research data and get their advice.
'Where do you live?' doesn't cover where I live:
Peoples, those are literally the continents. I get that Australia seems to exclude New Zealand and the smaller countries of Oceania, but the continent is still called Australia. Same with Europe. The continent isn't as neatly sectioned of by an ocean as most of the others, (plus the whole EU thing) but it is still neatly defined. If you are unsure which continent you live on, please check google.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Anya is LIVE right now
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Hi! I am conducting some research about people in fandoms. The google form is completely anonymous and takes less than 5 minutes to answer, so please take the time and fill it out! The form is aimed at basically anyone who reads or has read fanfiction (independent of fandom or ships etc)
Link: https://forms.gle/Px6qivFecm47tCes5 or click here
Disclaimer:
This started because I was curious if my subjective experience that a lot of people I met in fandom being neurodivergent and/or queer was because of my own bubble or because there are statistically more neurodivergent/queer people in fandom. I am not a professional data analyst but I will try my best :)
