Since fan studies questionnaires and surveys aren’t released every day, I thought it might be interesting to hear from professionals in the field about their experiences. With any luck, we’ll see more of these posts in the future. For the moment, I’m pleased to introduce a woman who needs no introduction: Karen Hellekson, co-editor of Transformative Works and Cultures and Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. -Madeline

Fandom research methods

Karen Hellekson

ClinicalTrials.gov provides a model for Fandom Research in terms of attempting to corral study information in one handy place. Fandom Research collects various methods of polling or querying various fan communities, whereas ClinicalTrials.gov collects information about clinical trials that may be accessed by researchers and by regular people who may want to get in on that new cancer drug trial. Compared with creating a good set of valid measures in the ethnography-based fan world, setting up a clinical trial is easy, if only because its protocols are universally well understood, thanks to tried-and-true codes of best practice. Institutional review board approval? Check! Informed consent? Check! Double-blind randomization? Check! Validated questionnaire? Check! Statistical analysis with the correct test for the type of data? Check!

Of course it’s inappropriate to generalize the protocols used in medical clinical trials to fandom research, but many acafans setting up studies need to be aware of the requirements that will ensure the validity—and publishability—of their work. Before initiating a study that involves human subjects, acafans affiliated with a university may need to wend their way through their institution’s byzantine institutional review board (IRB) paperwork, where they will be faced with ridiculous requirements that have nothing to do with their discipline. IRBs generally work with proposed studies that are biomedical or behavioral, not in the field of social science, and the one-size-fits-all paperwork reflects that.

Still, some of the IRB requirements make sense. Informed consent is a big one: does the polled group understand that you may quote them? How ought the researcher mask respondent identity when she reports her results? Related to this is the age of the respondents: in the United States, underage people can’t provide informed consent, and it seems unlikely that, at least in an online environment, their parents or guardians will grant permission in some verifiable way. A 16-year-old’s responses in your LiveJournal poll may actually be a huge problem.

Online research in fan studies

In fan studies, much work with human subjects is done online, and luckily, an organization exists to help guide researchers through appropriate protocols and behaviors: the Association of Internet Researchers. Their ethics guide, entitled Ethical decision-making and Internet research: Recommendations from the AOIR Ethics Working Committee, which was approved by an international committee in 2002, is available as a PDF download and is a must-read for researchers as they construct their study. In addition to providing much food for thought, it also provides information on acceptable protocols. For example, it is possible to obtain valid informed consent electronically, without an original signature on a piece of paper.

AOIR’s guidelines stress that the researcher needs to be aware of community standards and to work within them. But of course the variation of acceptable practice within fan communities is quite large. A researcher who uses a sock puppet to engage anonymously with her study group, so as to gain an insider’s perspective while masking her identity as a researcher, may be fine with one group, but with another, such misrepresentation may be seen as a betrayal. Standards on a closed Yahoo! group list may be far more restrictive than those collaborating on a public wiki.

Even simply quoting from an openly available source, like a blog post or a comment in an online bulletin board forum, is subject to community standards—but in practice, this seems to mean the community standards of the researcher. In the fan communities I’m personally a part of, I would request permission to quote from a blog post, and I’d be inclined to mask certain identifying features. In the communities I’m part of, this is the accepted protocol. Yet researchers who are not part of the community may violate community standards and freely quote without checking—after all, the post is public and freely available for anybody to view.

Researchers trolling LiveJournal to get that perfect fan quote may use it without permission if it is public, just like I troll big-media journalism/news sites to get perfect quotes from nonfans. LiveJournal drive-by quoters may be completely unaware that such quotation may be seen as a violation within that particular community. Despite this, as someone who evaluates the validity of methods in research papers, I am not going to impose my more narrow community standards on a perfectly reasonable practice. Most often, the writer comes from a different community.

Risk

Why, in my community, must I request permission from a writer to reproduce openly posted content? In a word, risk. I’ve worked with fans who have reposted content that I wanted to quote, to a different URL and perhaps under a masking user name, and then given me permission to quote from the new URL only. I’ve worked with fanfic writers who want the story citation to appear at a splash screen, not the direct URL for the story, so that readers would have to click through a disclaimer or a warning. Although such work is publicly available, the authors were concerned about their privacy: they perceived risk to themselves, and they appreciated the chance to minimize the risk. Publishing academic work widens an audience and may result in increased attention and scrutiny—which may be alarming to fans used to dealing with their friends inside the boundaries of their community’s well-established custom.

Outsiders to fan studies ought to check out the AOIR ethics guide, just as they ought to get to know their study community well enough to understand what sorts of standards have been established. Although public postings may be freely quoted, researchers need to be sensitive to risk, particularly when it comes to providing details that would inadvertently link a person’s fan pseudonym with her name in real life. Such a link is a single constant across all fan communities: although everyone may informally know that so-and-so on LiveJournal is actually a famous writer or a well-known lawyer, the two names are never, ever overtly linked. Creators of sexually explicit artworks, like fan fiction, avatars, or manipulated images, and creators with real concerns about being sued for copyright violation, like vidders, are particularly keen that a Google keyword search on their fan name not bring up their name in real life, fearing, and rightfully so, that this could result in risk to their employment or a lawsuit under their real name.

Theory into practice

Although standards of practice vary widely, researchers working with fans need to consider a few practical things—assuming, of course, that the study ought to go forward at all. AOIR asks, “What benefits may be gained from the research?” That’s the hard question, and it needs to be asked and answered before setting up the study.

Acafans who are considering publishing a study that involves human subjects need to know that the age of survey respondents is a big deal. Most publications will refuse to publish survey results from an underage sample because informed consent cannot be obtained.

Another publication requirement is either confirmation of IRB approval, or an explanation of why it’s okay to not have it. Unaffiliated scholars are thus at a disadvantage, as no IRB exists to rubber-stamp an approval or to grant an exemption, but following the AOIR’s guidelines and being very clear about permissions and protocols is acceptable in lieu of IRB approval. The editors of the publication need to be able to assess the study protocols and judge for themselves whether it was appropriate, so all such studies ought to have a methods section outlining the study design, subjects, and procedures.

But at the heart of all this research is the object of study: the fan herself or the fan artwork. The overarching question researchers need to ask is one of risk to the fan or the fan community. Will publication of certain details result in harm? What can be done to minimize the harm, such as masking identity, while appropriately sourcing the quotation?

Fan studies research is just coming into its own. It’s exciting to see so much enthusiasm and interest in the field. But it’s important to not lose sight of the autonomy and privacy of the object of study. There is always a place for thoughtful studies that ask, and then attempt to answer, compelling questions. It’s important to do this with rigor and care for the subject.

Karen Hellekson is coeditor of the peer-reviewed journal Transformative Works and Cultures, which uses AOIR’s guidelines when considering essays with an ethnographic component.