I’m Casey Fiesler, a longtime fandom community member and also a professor in the Department of Information Science at University of Colorado Boulder. This semester I am teaching a research-based class in online fandom, and we are conducting a survey that covers many different questions of interest to information science or fan studies researchers about fanfiction! We do ask that you are at least 18 years old to participate; though this is mostly for a class project, we have gone through typical ethics review at our university and this study includes a consent form.
The survey is a mix of multiple choice and open answer questions, and you can answer as much or as little as you like. On average, the survey takes about 15 or 20 minutes to complete.
We will ask for some basic demographic information (any of which you can skip), but won’t require any identifying information – unless you want to give us your email address so that you can be updated about any results from the survey.
Because of some of the research questions that groups in my class want to answer it would be particularly great to get participants who write or read in the following fandoms: Sports RPF, Overwatch, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and Marvel Cinematic Universe. There are also questions that relate to things like fandom lifecycles, videogame fanfic, identity in fanfiction, and ethics and privacy in fandom. Many of the questions in this survey were drafted by first-time student researchers!
Whether you participate or not, please consider sharing this survey with your social networks! And if you’d like to find out more about Casey’s previous research about fandom, see these Tumblr posts: Fan Platform Use Over Time and design of Archive of Our Own.
Reblogs are appreciated, and thank you! You can email me at casey.fiesler@colorado.edu if you have any questions or comments.
Based on some of the comments I’ve gotten about this survey, here are some FAQs!
1. My fandom wasn’t on the list of fandoms. 😦
That’s okay! This survey is actually a bunch of smaller surveys where individual groups in my class came up with their own research questions, and some were about specific fandoms. Though I tried to include a question or two that anyone could answer even if they weren’t in that fandom (in case, for example, there weren’t enough sports RPF writers to give my students enough data to analyze!), but for the most part, not being part of those fandoms just meant you had less questions to answer. Most of the survey was not fandom-specific!
2. I wish I could have skipped over questions that weren’t relevant to me.
You can! None of the questions in the survey are required (including, e.g., demographics). You can absolutely decline to anything anything you like, either because you can’t think of any answer, you don’t want to answer, or you just don’t want to take the time.
3. Some people both read AND write fanfiction on AO3!
Man, I’m impressed by the number of excellent survey designers there are among my participants. 😀 This is such a great point! In this case, the answers to that question were mostly just to get you to the NEXT question depending on your answers, so the distinction between “write and read” and “write and not read” wasn’t important.
4. How come I usually don’t ever find out what happened after I do surveys like this? Or: When will I see results from this?
I might write an entire post about this. 🙂 Remember that the process from conducting research to publishing findings is a looooooong road (often years!). I sometimes try to post some nuggets of findings sooner than that as a way to thank the community, but it’s not always easy to do. In this case, a big chunk of the survey is feeding into class projects, so there may or may not be interesting/useful findings, and I would also need permission from the students to share any of their work. However, some of the survey (in particular the privacy/ethics piece) is related to my own research and that of my PhD students, so that’s more likely to turn into something that I can share. As for when… hard to say!!!
5. Why did you ask about X and not Y?
There are SO MANY awesome things that could be explored about fandom, but this survey focused on specific research questions that students in my class were interested in.
6. I wanted to say more about X but you didn’t ask!
I thought about including even more open answer questions (of the “tell us more!”) variety but didn’t want the survey to be an hour long. 🙂 Some people are leaving more comments about parts of the survey in the last question, and that’s totally fine!
7. Some questions were confusing or didn’t seem to have the answer I would give as an option.
Designing good surveys is really hard. 😦 I hope that overall this wasn’t too much of a problem!
8. FANDOM IS A THING THAT ACADEMICS STUDY?!?!?!
Yep. 😀 And trust me, I’m far from the only one! One cool place to start is OTW’s academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures.
If you have any other comments or questions, you’re welcome to email me or send me a message here on Tumblr!
I’m Casey Fiesler, a longtime fandom community member and also a professor in the Department of Information Science at University of Colorado Boulder. This semester I am teaching a research-based class in online fandom, and we are conducting a survey that covers many different questions of interest to information science or fan studies researchers about fanfiction! We do ask that you are at least 18 years old to participate; though this is mostly for a class project, we have gone through typical ethics review at our university and this study includes a consent form.
The survey is a mix of multiple choice and open answer questions, and you can answer as much or as little as you like. On average, the survey takes about 15 or 20 minutes to complete.
We will ask for some basic demographic information (any of which you can skip), but won’t require any identifying information – unless you want to give us your email address so that you can be updated about any results from the survey.
Because of some of the research questions that groups in my class want to answer it would be particularly great to get participants who write or read in the following fandoms: Sports RPF, Overwatch, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and Marvel Cinematic Universe. There are also questions that relate to things like fandom lifecycles, videogame fanfic, identity in fanfiction, and ethics and privacy in fandom. Many of the questions in this survey were drafted by first-time student researchers!
Whether you participate or not, please consider sharing this survey with your social networks! And if you’d like to find out more about Casey’s previous research about fandom, see these Tumblr posts: Fan Platform Use Over Time and design of Archive of Our Own.
Reblogs are appreciated, and thank you! You can email me at casey.fiesler@colorado.edu if you have any questions or comments.
you ever realize how much better life is when you just. fucking ignore canon? toss canon out the window? grind canon into dust under your heel? repeatedly punch canon in the face with one hand while writing a 50k fix-it fic with the other? pure bliss
So I went to my therapist the other day, and later in the appointment I mentioned that I like to write self-insert fiction to cope. I also said that I generally hide it and felt embarrassed mentioning it due to the way people treat the concept online.
She said that self-inserting yourself into art and writing is an incredibly healthy way to feel good about yourself, and that she was appalled when I told her about the way it’s mocked on the internet.
So never feel bad about self-inserting or enjoying reader insert fanfiction, 1/1 professionals agree that it’s good for you and that the jerks who say you’re doing something wrong are just uneducated and don’t understand. Never listen to the anons who try to make you feel bad ❤
Have a really nice day!
make that 2/2 professionals. my therapist talked about this too. she also talked about projecting onto characters and said that was an extremely healthy way to cope with things that you’re dealing with and things that have happened to you!!
Have you ever seen a twitter thread (or, in this case, two!) that so perfectly expressed everything you’d felt over months and months of harassment persistent? With all credit to @blackblobyellowcone, who is clearly amazing and completely gets it– not just why us women write and read the erotica that we do, but the history behind the censorship we, as a gender, have experienced. Bravo.
Question of Smoke 