Reason number eleventy-billion I don’t do the fan studies side of my current field (or my “home” field for that matter) is that it’s so freaking hard to figure out representative samples, and I don’t envy those who try to do it.
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It's been a long time since my social science days, but curiosity has the better of me. What factors are actively preventing the study? No good data sets, too many bad ones, internal politics, funding and politics, etc?
aug 31, 2025, 4:50 am • 0 0 • view
Too many different sites/spheres — many audience members are largely offline, & online each platform (Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, etc) has its own culture. Plus, a ton of fans have retreated to different private Discords, some of which specifically ban anyone with ties to cast/crew.
aug 31, 2025, 5:05 am • 4 0 • view
Do you feel like there are workable solutions to slowly building enough of a survey set to create a meta study (e.g the difficulty is other factors), or is it simply and fundamentally too many inaccessible cultural microcosms?
aug 31, 2025, 6:06 am • 0 0 • view
I feel like this really depends on what aspect you’re interested in illuminating. What are you trying to learn about them and for what purpose?
aug 31, 2025, 2:49 pm • 0 0 • view
I wish I could say, but it spans general interest in understanding those online communities to seeing the different academic processes at work. I'm so used to the tight controls in Clinical Research that seeing the survey/consent process in softer science [sic] is fascinating.
aug 31, 2025, 3:05 pm • 0 0 • view
And, as noted by the good Doc herself, this is even harder to manage when there's cross-over between academia and industry, so seeing how academics personally handle that issue (not only avoiding bias, but dealing with suspicions of it by their subjects) is a whole realm unto itself.
aug 31, 2025, 3:05 pm • 0 0 • view
See that’s the thing is I come from a black feminist and an ethnographic perspective where the goal is to embrace and push into the bias, not to attempt objectivity which is ultimately a doomed project. IMHO fandom studies can use science but it’s not science. It’s cultural studies.
aug 31, 2025, 3:08 pm • 1 0 • view
I guess I might go as far as to say that what Em is describing as fan studies here is a bit of a misnomer bc most of us aren’t interested in making broad statements about an entire fandom. That would be more audience studies at least as a Henry Jenkins adviser that’s how I’d put it.
aug 31, 2025, 3:10 pm • 1 0 • view
As much as it's wading into dangerous territory, I don't honestly believe that including lived experience (personal or while studying a group) is necessarily "not science." If there's an honest record of what's occurring, and individuals are critical of claimed truth, it's still science.
aug 31, 2025, 3:55 pm • 1 0 • view
Coming from the Clin Research side (past tense), and especially the Reg/QA end where ethics and safety are on the extremes of testing for bias and error, we still relied on ethnographic studies where more "objective" data simply wasn't available. If anything, that's fundamental to the field.
aug 31, 2025, 3:55 pm • 1 0 • view
To be clear, I’m responding originally to Gena’s post about work that *deviates* from the sound practice of very focusing on very specific case studies. My original point (pre-caffeine) was to point to the methodological challenge of trying to say something confidently about audience writ large.
aug 31, 2025, 4:34 pm • 1 0 • view
I corrected that to advisee* twice and it still wound up wrong. :/
aug 31, 2025, 3:11 pm • 0 0 • view
Well I think most of us who identify as fandom studies folks are not interested in representative samples of anything. I’m much more interested in case studies and explaining phenomenon.
aug 31, 2025, 2:46 pm • 0 0 • view
I would say the people making generalizations about huge swaths are usually approaching it from an audience studies or mass media studies perspective and there’s a lot of disagreement between approaches — I saw this playing out in my own dept
aug 31, 2025, 2:48 pm • 0 0 • view
Dude I can't consistently follow the fandom of the two shows I work on, I cannot fathom trying to decipher it for Actual Play as a whole
aug 31, 2025, 3:47 am • 1 0 • view
Sometimes I toy with the idea of trying to craft a standardized survey that AP creators & their teams could then distribute variants of to their respective fan bases, but the fever passes.
aug 31, 2025, 4:25 am • 2 0 • view