Looking back, I wish there had been a question asking, “In an ideal world, how often would you read romantic/sexual fiction?” Because ideally, I would NEVER read it. In reality, I read it all the time because it’s my only option. I’m not suggesting that anyone could have known to include it, but it’s definitely what I was thinking about when I got to that section of the results.

This is a really important point. We make compromises when there isn’t enough of what suits our interests or needs. This is alluded to in the higher consumption rates for non-sexual and non-romantic works by Asexual and Aromantic participants compared to their Allo counterparts: some people are doing more work to find what they want, even if they can’t avoid the stuff celebrated by the majority.

There was another clue along those lines that I didn’t include in the Asexuality and Aromantism report because the differences were small, but I’ll pop it in here because it touches on what @kiragecko is alluding to. Proportionally more participants in the Asexual and Aromantic groups experienced difficulty avoiding sexual content that they personally found disturbing.

It’s a small difference, but that doesn’t make it irrelevant. There is a lot more to learn about the strategies people use to navigate and create works that suite their interests and priorities, and how the structures and tides fo fandom can make this more difficult for some people and groups.

So, yes, @kiragecko, I agree that it would have been nice to have had space in this survey for people to report preferences as well as practices. Hopefully someone will get to asking these kinds of questions soon.

tppfandomstats

Fandom and Sexuality Survey: Sex Lives of fanfiction readers

The fandom and sexuality survey included a section that focused primarily on the sex lives of participants. It asked about specific aspects of their histories and how they engaged in sexual activity in recent times.

A lot of research in people’s sex lives focuses on specific actions, like what varieties of intercourse people engage in, and in the risks they take, like for STI research and intervention. This was not the focus here. For one, we were interested in the whole of fans sex lives, including solitary sexual activity (aka masturbation), for another, we wanted a baseline for interpreting their engagement with sexually explicit fanworks. Additionally, the fan fiction community seems to be more open and affirming of peoples different experiences of sexuality, thus offering an opportunity to ask some questions that have yet to come up in large scale survey research in sexology. (At least to my knowledge at the time.)

Under the cut is more thorough discussion of the results of this part of the survey but here is the TLDR:

Fanfiction readers, who are mostly ciswomen, more frequently engage in solitary sexual activity than women generally.
Less than half used sex toys 50% of the time they take matters into their own hands.
Barely more than half agreed or somewhat agreed that they usually use sexually explicit fanworks or fandom fantasy when engaging is solitary sexual activity.
More participants agreed than disagreed with the statement “I am satisfied with my sex life.”

Get all the details (and so many graphs!) below

tppfandomstats

Age and Experience in Fandom*

*English-reading online transformative fandom often using AO3 and tumblr and willing to complete surveys :)

This month’s @threepatchpodcast episode, When I’m 64, looks at fandom and aging. To go along with these discussions, here are some demographic stats from a few fandom surveys on the age distribution in our online fandom communities.

CAVEAT: These surveys are not random samples of the transformative fandom population. All numbers come from voluntary online surveys distributed on social media and fandom media, and the limits of opportunity and inclination introduced biases (more on that for the F&S survey here). Still, it’s the best data we have, so here is what @fffinnagain is willing to infer.

From these survey results we can draw a few main points:

Fans’ ages range from preteens to late sixties and beyond
Many (possibly most) are in their 20′s and 30′s
Most of us started engaging in things we fan over by the age of 19
But new fans can be of any age
For adult fans, there is a fairly even chance they’ve been in fandom for less than 3 years (~5-10% by our counts)

The usual plots and explanations below.

How old are these fans?

Whatever our expectations, responses to fandom surveys show that these fanfiction readers seem to be mostly in their twenties and thirties, but there is no apparent upper bound on age in these communities.

From the 2013 AO3 census (11k participants), the average age was 25, with a median of 22-24, and a mode age of 21. 4% were under the age of 16 and 19% of participants in the the AO3 census reported being 30+.

However, the distribution of age depends a lot on community. Our small TPP listener survey in 2015 (230 participants) showed an older demographic: 55% of participants were 30 and above, with a strong mode between 28 and 32. Also, approximately 12% were over the age of 50.

TPP’s fandom and sexuality survey (2195 participants) limited its participant pool to fans 18 and over, but the trends fall somewhere between these two. Average age of 28, mode of 25, and 40% over 30. The distribution of those responses is plotted above.

While none of these surveys capture these online fandom communities cleanly, the consistency of the pattern strengthens their claim: the largest age bracket are people in their 20′s, with substantial presence of teens and people in their 30′s. In all three surveys, more than 50% were between 20 and 40. Fans above the age of 40 are not as common, making up somewhere between 5% and 35% of the active population, depending on the community.

How long have these fans been in fandom?

The fandom and sexuality survey included questions about fans’ first experiences, including the age they started engaging with fandom stuff.

By 19, 70.9% of the F&S survey participants had begun their first forays into fandom life! These early experiences may not have been within the same communities they currently inhabit, but the enthusiasm for transformative works starts young, and opportunity may be an important factor in who gets involved when.

From this we can run a quick calculation: how long has it’s been since their first fandom experiences? Across these 2195 fans, the median time since first fandom was 11 years, mode of 15. We can’t assume that all participants have been consuming fanworks continuously since first contact, however these responses make it obvious that interest in fanfiction, fan art, etc., is not restricted to the eight years of teenage-hood.

There is a long tail in this graph, with small but tangible numbers of people coming into this part of fandom in the 40′s and 50′s. Are older fans more or less likely to be recent inductees?

To look at this from a different angle, we broke the participants into age brackets. This figure reports the percentage of each age bracket with X number of years since their first fandom.

The most important spot here is the first clump of columns: fans that have been involved in fandom less than 3 years. These are the newbies. Quite strikingly, they are pretty even across these groups: ~5-10% survey participants in each bracket were relatively new to fandom!

If I (@fffinnagain) were to hazard a guess, the ratio of active fans with less than 3 years experience is probably higher than 1 in 10. The F & S survey was long and serious and I can imagine a larger portion of newer fans would have felt unsure of whether their experience was relevant. Not everyone steps on to a scene and owns it within 12 months! However, I wouldn’t assume this factor would interact significantly with age, so it still seems fair to extrapolate that within these age bracket, the proportion of new fans is still consistent. Teenagers, however, would be a different story and this data sadly cannot speak to their experiences.

All this suggests that when we meet adult fans, be they in their 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, or older, there is a pretty even chance that they are still getting acclimatized to this culture. So be kind, and don’t assume one way or the other.

#fandom culture #fandom stats #three patch podcast #age and fandom

It’s Copyright Week! Fans are 21st century creators, and you can help the OTW by taking a survey: https://goo.gl/Cs0OGM

fffinnagain

The survey is great! and Important! Go take it!

tppfandomstats

kiragecko asked:

Is there any way to help crunch the numbers with you guys? I'm a stay at home mom and value anything that lets me use other parts of my brain. And data is pretty. (Plus, I'm very invested in your future discussions about ace/aro stats.)

Hey, sure, we’d be happy for the help!

For the aro/ace analysis, it would really be helpful to know which questions in the survey would be most interesting to consider, both:

- descriptively of the people who reported Ace/Aro orientations (and those identifying as on the corresponding spectrums.)

- comparatively to the non-aro/ace participants.

We could run through all 168 answers with just this subgroup, but conveying the patterns of similarities and differences requires more focus, and some good points of comparison are already articulated in some of the closing comments.

Otherwise, we need help processing all of the comments by theme, clearing out identifying information before the data set can be shared openly, and orienting future analyses.

I’ll be in touch by DM : )

#ask #data sharing #asexuality #Q3 #Q4 #Q59

tppfandomstats

threepatchpodcast

Episode 56a: Fandom & Sexuality Survey Report - Extended Cut

The full hour long discussion about the results of the Fandom and Sexuality Survey with @fffinnagain, @sweeter-than-cynicism, and @sundayduck. We talk about:

how these fans contrast with the media definition of fangirl
how transformative fandom has contributed to fans identities
how we handle sexually explicit fanworks
how we can relate to characters in the heat of the moment

Show notes, streaming, and direct download information are available HERE at three-patch.com. Or subscribe to the podcast via RSS, iTunes, or Google Play.

More analyses of the survey results are also available @tppfandomstats.

tppfandomstats

Word cloud of from the 28k words of comments left by our participants!

We couldn’t cover everything in an hour, but the discussion does help put the survey into context.

#three patch podcast #audio link #extended cut #discussion #report

tppfandomstats

Our fandom full of MOGI

Are the fans in transformative fandom more LGB than the general population? Does fandom attract a lot of trans and gender nonconforming people? (MOGI = Minority Orientations and Gender Identities)

With numbers from a few fandom surveys and general population surveys, we show that Fandom(*) is very very LGBTQA. Fans answers to the Fandom and Sexuality Survey tell us why.

(*)The Fandom captured by these surveys is dominated by English speaking AO3 and tumblr users who are into or are open to dudeslash. There are other fandom bubbles out there (for example, Wattpad users) but we do not have sufficient information to describe them.

Just how different is this Fandom for the general population?

Here is a table of UK and US distributions of sexual orientations alongside the results of three fandom surveys.

Read the analysis of this table and interpretation with other results from the Fandom and Sexuality Survey below the cut.

#fandom and sexuality survey #fandom stats discussion #fandom #sexual orientation #gender identity #Q59 #Q2 #Q3 #Q32 #Q42

tppfandomstats

F&S survey: Genders and Orientations

This post in part of a the series of question-wise results from the Fandom and Sexuality Survey. These report the total numbers and nitty-gritty details.

This post summarizing the Gender Identities, Sexual Orientations, and Romantic Orientations across the group. With the total counts, we report some information on subsets of participants as well.

Quick summary:

A notable portion of participants identify as neither Male nor Female, 10.7% (234), while only 3.6% (78) identify as Male.
More participants identified as Bisexual, 34.8% (764), than Heterosexual, 24.0% (526).
The question on romantic orientation confused some and resulted in a distributions quite similar to the Sexual orientation question, however a great number of participants reported clear differences in their answers to each.

Get all the details below. A more theoretical take on this data and how it relates to other survey results is now available too.

#fandom and sexuality survey #Gender #Sexual Orientation #Romantic Orientation #Q2 #Q3 #Q4 #Counts

tppfandomstats

threepatchpodcast

Anonymous asked:

hi! i was taking your fandom and sexuality survey, and do you think on the race section you could change "latin@" to "latinx"? it's just that "latinx" is nonbinary trans inclusive. thanks! the survey is a really great idea, btw!

threepatchpodcast answered:

Thank you for the suggestion, that’s a very good point! Unfortunately, we can’t change that part of the survey while it is active, but we’ll keep this in mind for future reference.

With all of our demographics questions, we had to go a bit outside of the most common sets of options, and we chose to leave space to self-identify basically everywhere. This means a lot more work on the analysis side, first to integrate the text field responses and later to manage comparisons with other studies, but it’s a great opportunity to see what other options and identities are becoming prominent in fandom.

A note on the race and ethnicity questions: Internet surveys often don’t bother asking about this because the categorisations of race do not generalise across international populations. We don’t have the words, and the implications of racial identities change a great deal from region to region. But at the same time, race really does matter in our fandom communities, including assumptions we make about those behind the pseudos and icons we see online. So we opted for a compromise: ask about race with a (slightly modified) US-centric range of options. These categories are too broad to capture individuals experiences (as is always the case with surveys) but it’s a start. Hopefully the next fandom survey will think to include a similar questions and we can work towards more effective and inclusive terminology.

Stepping off the beaten track to avoid common frustrations also means making new mistakes, and we appreciate all the feedback we’ve receive from participants since the survey launch.

tppfandomstats

An ask submitted to @threepatchpodcast while the survey was collecting responses. Very much appreciated!

#fandom and sexuality survey #race and ethnicity #Q09 #anon ask

tppfandomstats

Anonymous asked:

Why wasn't race included in your survey? You find AGE pertinent, but you just default assume that everyone is white? Or you just simply don't care?

Hi Anon!

We did ask about race and ethnicity in the Fandom and Sexuality Survey, as best we could, and we were very surprised by the responses. Finding a succinct way of expressing this in the Teaser Report was difficult, however. Hence the awkward statement than “84% identified solely as white”.

Race and Ethnicities of Participants

The classification of racial and ethnic identities (and their associated experiences) does not generalize internationally. We couldn’t find useful best practices for international surveys, and so we opted to start from a list that suited what we expected to be our largest population, North Americans, and made a few modifications. Our thanks to the participants who took the care to report more relevant terms via the text field of the “Other” option. Figure 1, below reports the percentages and ratios of participants using each of the provided labels.

Many population surveys are forced single choice with an option for “mixed race”. We were more interested in identification and asked participants to check all that applied.

Figure 1: Counts of Race/Ethnicity labels selected. Participants were asked to “select all that affect you on a daily or weekly basis.” and could self identify with other labels/descriptions. The numbers reported with labels report total number of uses.

A number of the Other comments expressed concern and confusion about how or whether these participants’ identities fit into the provided categories. The most common written in responses were Jewish & Ashkenazi Jewish (24) and Southeast Asian (14). As is made obvious in plot above, the vast majority of participants identified as White: 83.7% identified sole as White, and another 6.7% included white in a mixed identity. A total of 8.1% (177) used multiple labels and/or reported a mixed race identity directly under the Other tag (25).

Minority Status by Race and Ethnicity

Figure 2: Percentage of participants who identify as a racial or ethnic minority within their fandom community.

An important part of different experiences of race and ethnicity is majority vs minority status. In fandom, we evidently can have very large majorities, but fandom communities are not always predominantly white. Rather than assume fans experiences from the results of the previous question, participants were asked directly about their minority/majority status within the community relevant to their fandom experience. Only a small portion, about 1 in 8 of our participants, identified as a racial or ethnic minority within their fandom communities.

Fandom and Fans of Colour

We were shocked by how few fans of colour participated in this survey. As we’ve said before, our two thousand participants do not represent all of fandom, and here we may be seeing a part of the problem with sampling fandom via social media: tumblr and Twitter support social silos that marginalise people with different cultural perspectives, experiences, and needs.

But this could also be a feature of slash heavy fandom. The AO3 census of 2013, which gathered five times as many responses on tumblr, included a question about racial identity, in this case adapted from the British classification. These results reported a similar distribution of identities, but with a greater proportion of non-white participants over all. Comparing our results to theirs:

The vast majority identified as White: 83.8% total vs our 90.4% total
The next most frequent racial identity was Asian: 8% compared to our total of 5.6% across East Asian, South Asian and South East Asian
2.4% identifying as Black compared to only 1.6% of our participants.

The other categories do not map as direct, but they suggest the same trend.

From this information, we can’t separate out the consequences of the sampling process (convenience sampling on social media) from type of fandom this and the AO3 census shared (mostly AO3 and tumblr users into dudeslash).

Does the Three Patch Podcast care?

To answer your last questions, we don’t think that age is more important than race, but race IS more complicated to discuss than age. These results divide fans of colour into small and potentially vulnerable groups, and sticking that first graph by itself in the Teaser Report would have felt irresponsible.

Hopefully this post gives enough context for these results to contribute constructively to ongoing discussions about fandom and race. We would love to hear more about how individual fans and fan groups feel about them.

Thanks for sharing your concern.

#fandom and sexuality survey #fans of colour #race and ethnicity #Q09 #Q10 #Voice from the void

tppfandomstats

Anonymous asked:

where is the gay/lesbian option in your sexuality question?

Hey Nonnie,

The survey question on sexual orientation included the options:

Asexual
Gray-asexual
Demisexual
Homosexual
Bisexual
Pansexual
Heterosexual
Queer
Questioning
Other

And the Other option included a text field so that participants could self-identify with terms not already provided. Participants were asked to check all that applied.

By accident, we didn’t have a gay/lesbian option specifically, but some people did specify these labels under other. Homosexual is not often used as a category these days, there are many reasons to prefer gay/lesbian together or separately, and it is unfortunate that this antiquated term was included here. Thankfully, many participants understood the intended meaning of these categories and proceeded anyway.

A post specifically on the Sexual Orientations and Gender Identities of fandom is forthcoming, using the results of the Fandom & Sexuality survey, other fandom surveys, and random sampling surveys of Great Britain and the US. : )

#anon ask #sexual orientation #q3 #gay/lesbian

tppfandomstats

obotligtnyfiken

Visualisation for Three Patch Podcast Fandom & Sexuality Survey

A while ago, @fffinnagain asked me if I wanted to do a visualisation for the Fandom and Sexuality Survey they have been doing for Three Patch Podcast. This is an amazing effort and I am proud to play a small part in it.

Check out the first teaser from this amazing - and amazingly large - study. And make sure to follow @tppfandomstats while you’re at it. There’s plenty more where that came from!

A few notes on how the visualisation was developed below the cut.

Afficher davantage

#sample bias #visialisation #fandom and sexuality survey

tppfandomstats

Fandom & Sexuality Survey Teaser Report

The @threepatchpodcast‘s survey on Fandom and Sexuality has been studied for a month now, and we are ready to share some results! The survey covered a lot beyond the few graphs and numbers listed above, and these numbers gain meaning when put in the context.

Follow @tppfandomstats to catch analyses on topics such as:

The prevalence of LGBTQA fans
Masturbation and fandom
The experiences of Asexual Fans
How we relate to characters while they do it
Whether fandom encourages sexual autonomy

Or read ahead with the Initial Report,if you really like graphs and bibliographies. Link below the read more.

Visualisations by: @obotligtnyfiken and @fffinnagain

#fandom #sexuality #fandom and sexuality survey #three patch podcast #fandom stats discussion