HiE - A Quantitative Sampling · 4:45am Aug 25th, 2013
This blog post presents a distribution of occupation of the main characters featured in on-site stories with a "Human in Equestria" setting.
Convenient sampling is used - stories in the Human in Equestria group were examined; every third story in the left column in each page of the sub-folders is recorded as a rough estimation of overall distribution. Duplication of records is checked against. A total of 192 stories are sampled among a total of 4907 stories, or nearly 4% of total. Note, the total number of stories contains numerous duplicate records as the same stories can be in multiple sub-folders.
If the particular story
1. contain no human main character (with a specified job)
2. contain no readable content
3. is actually about humanized/anthropomorphic characters,
the next story below will be examined instead.
Below are the results:
Afterword: Since the coding process required careful (and unavoidable) reading of the criteria-fitting stories, it often came close to giving me aneurysm.
On the bright side, I come to start liking authors who give their characters' complete bio in the first paragraph.
Wow. Way to go, really taking one for the team for this little project. I can only imagine the number of Everfree Forest misadventures you had to endure.
1306963 Now that you've mentioned it, there seems to be a distinctive mark on the surface of my desk, presumably from the constant headdesking.
Now I want to cross-examine this data against the actual distribution of occupations among bronies. Most are students, according to the surveys I've seen, but how many actually are soldiers, compared to how many simply want to be?
I'm guess there aren't that many astronauts, either.
1307514 According to Bronystudy, ''70% of the Bronies were full or part-time students, while 32.7% had full or part-time employment." Compare it with the 20.3% soldier protagonist prevalence here. Consider it is highly unlikely that over 60% of the employed fans (Assuming that there is no significant differences in composition between the general fandom and fimfiction frequenters) are soldiers and even if they are soldiers, they need not necessarily write soldier-based fanfiction, I would say the majority of stories with soldier protagonists are wish fulfillment rather than appealing to base identity. From my experience during the coding process, a significant part of stories with soldier protagonists contain heavy cultural references to games and various literary works, so that is another point of support. Student protagonists, on the other hand, are more likely to be written in appeal to the personal histories of authors and readers.
The study quoted above is another curiosity. Their methodology is basic scientific query used in modern psychology, but it's interesting and very informative nonetheless on the veracity of some common perceptions and nuances of the (mostly American/English) fandom. As a foreigner, this kind of studies are quite enjoyably revealing.
We Americans are a warrior culture, and much more so today than even twenty years ago. Only about one third of one percent of our population is active-duty military, and only one percent or so has direct family military connections; yet soldiers play a huge part of out self-identity and popular mythos. This also relates to how Americans feel about guns in general.
1307565 Well regulated militia, eh?
1309137 yeah, something like that.