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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But, if you happen to have some primer material that's open access, I'd absolutely love to read up on the topic (no rush or pressure, lord knows academics need less pressure every day, and especially on the weekend). And also, an obligatory "Damn you autocorrect!"
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.
I corrected that to advisee* twice and it still wound up wrong. :/