This excellent post at Rough Theory tells us everything we should never do in fan studies:
Assuming this mess is not some sort of elaborate research-themed performance art, or the result of a revenge-fuelled identity theft, researchers Ogi Ogas and partner Sai Chaitanya Gaddam are trying their best to demonstrate to the world that they are something like the academic research equivalent to Wheeler. They have blundered into an online community whose members write and read, among other things, erotically-themed fan fiction, and have presented community members with a poorly-designed questionnaire (now taken down, but for a while being modified on the fly as people lined up with complaints about the research design - participants have posted screenshots and a text version of the survey after its initial modifications - note that a number of the final option responses and some other warnings and qualifications seem to have been added in response to criticisms of the survey in its original form - the modifications are often palpably different in style from the original text).
Among many other problems, the questionnaire asks respondents to provide sensitive information about sexual habits, desires and fantasies, in a setting where the questionnaire could be accessed by minors, without - as far as I can tell - having vetted the research design with their university’s IRB (the researchers are currently being hounded across several websites with demands to answer the question of whether they did, in fact, submit the project for ethics review - while answering other questions, they have steadfastly ignored this one: quick suggestion that, if the researchers don’t mean to imply the answer is ‘no’, then they should probably address this question very explicitly, very soon).
I highly recommend that you read the entirety of the post, if you haven’t already. And I can only hope that I never fail this hard. Wow. (Please, somebody, if you’re reading this: warn me before I fail this hard? Thank you.) Not least because I include a chapter on cognitive narratology as it pertains to fanfiction in my thesis. (Hint: Google Lisa Zunshine.)
#1 by Katie Freund at September 3rd, 2009
It’s really rather amazing how far this has blown up: I had a colleague ask me about it because the folks in our English department were talking about it. I simultaneously pity these researchers, and am shocked and disgusted by their lack of ethical research.
I had several drafts of my survey read by fannish friends in order to make sure it was acceptable. I
It also made me laugh that these researchers changed questions and sections in the middle of the survey’s run!
#2 by Madeline Ashby at September 3rd, 2009
I’m with you there on the mingled pity and disgust. Pity because no one wants to FAIL in caps, but disgust because the tone of the survey was so wildly unscientific. As I said in my post, I have a chapter in my thesis that draws on cognitive narratology as a lens through which to read fanfic as part of the human storytelling impulse. But this survey operated from the mistaken notion that brain patterns can be read from, well, survey answers and not a CAT scan. That’s not how the brain works and that’s not how neuroscience works. Real neuroscientists know that. And that’s not even mentioning the totally condescending tone of the survey itself. There’s just so much wrong with this situation.