Results of the study

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Dear Lost fans,

In May last year some of you took part on a study I was conducting about the Lost community. I promised to publish some results in October, but just couldn’t make it! One of the most important reasons I couldn’t, was that I wanted to wait for my thesis to be evaluated from the professors (which happened a month ago), so I could feel free to write, without having to think about possible consequences (if they read about the results in advance).

I hope you can understand my motive and forgive me!:-)

First of all: thank you ALL very very much for helping me by filling out the survey! And a special BIG THANK YOU goes to Andy from DarkUFO for posting my study on his site and thereby helping me reach so many Lost fans!

My thesis got an A- (in German 1,3), so I know all my hard work was worth it! But I definitely couldn’t have done it without you!

About the study:

It was meant for my thesis on the Free University of Berlin (major: Media and Communication) and I had to write it in German. Therefore I can’t publish the whole thing here, because I just don’t have time to translate it all. But I will try to present you the most important findings and give you information about the demographics of Lost fans who took part on the study.

But before I do that – I have to mention that all the results are non-representative for all Lost fans, because it wasn’t conducted on a randomly chosen sample (which was practically impossible). Only those people participated, who saw the invitation on various fan sites, had time and wanted to participate on the study.

Nevertheless the results can give some clues about the rest of the lost fan community, who use the internet and visit fan and/or spoiler sites and forums.

The idea:

I spent a great deal of time on Lost fan sites and I noticed the high activity of the Lost online community and their high emotional involvement with the show. Many people are expressing feelings about Lost in forums and chats.

That made me think it could be interesting to compare the communication with the online community to the communication of the fans with other people they know offline and to thereby measure the importance of online communication in comparison to offline communication.

My first thought was to explore the communication in general, but my professor advised me to focus on emotional communication.

The goal of the study was to find out, with which group of people we talk about most emotionally (the strength of emotional communication about Lost): partner, a good friend, family member, a peer (work colleague, fellow student or pupil) or the online community. I will try to post the most important results in different post, so you can comment them individually if you want to. Please forgive me because it might not all look as good as it should, but it is my first time to try to post a blog :-)!

Cheers

Damjan (read: Damian) Goldt

The demographics of the sample

In this part you can read about the basic information about the Lost fans who took part and finished the survey. This survey sample consists of 2351 people.

The great majority of these fans found the link to the study on the darkufo site (80%!!!), the second biggest group was from the Lost fan forums on the German student network StudiVZ (8%), and the 3rd biggest group came from the lostpedia.com (7%) forum.

Most people who took part in the study came from the USA (57%), Germany (14%), UK (8%) and Canada (5%). Sorry I didn’t specify more than these 9 countries, but I actually expected that only these four countries could give a sample that is big enough to work with (had to be more than 100 users), so I took only the top 9 of the origin IP countries of the darkufo site.

As you can see in the graph there were more men (55%) who took part on the study than women (45%)

Most people were between 18 and 34 years old (almost 70%). Nice to know that there could be 0,21% people over 65 in our mids:)!

One of the most interesting information in my opinion is that the great majority of the sample seems to have a degree of higher education (58%) or a high school diploma that allows them to study on a university (26%).

This amazing fact can not only be explained by posting the survey on a student network (because only 8% of the sample came from there) – but it could mean that students and ex students might be more willing to help a fellow student by taking the survey. But I am just guessing here, as I said before: the sample data doesn’t necessarily have to reflect the data from all lost fans who visit the fan sites, or, even less so, from all lost viewers!

From all these lost fans who took part in the study 28% didn’t feel as a part of the Lost community (and are probably lurkers, because they had to visit a fan site or forum to see the link to the study).

The most people of the sample seem to be heavy internet users (55% uses it more than 4 hours a day), but not necessarily heavy TV viewers.

And last, but certainly not least, there was almost a tie between singles (49%) and the ones in a relationship (22%)/married (29%)!

How often, with whom and why?

When asked how often they talk about Lost, the participants gave quite different answers concerning online and offline communication.

Only 2% of the sample never talks about Lost offline, but 29% seem to never interact with the online community, although they obviously visit fan and spoiler sites and forums. This could be a first signal that, since talking offline seems to be more usual, it is also more important for the most people, than interacting online.

Most people watch Lost alone (41%) and never interact with the online community while watching (74%):
And from those who interact with the online community while watching seem still to prefer watching with someone and not interacting (48%) or just watching alone and not interacting (32%). Only 9% like to do both at the same time or prefer to watch alone and interact with the online community (11%).

In the time between two episodes participants stated they would most likely talk about Lost with a good friend (37%).


It is a similar situation, when asked with whom they generally prefer talking to: the good friend (35%) is way in front of anyone else, then came family (19%), then partner (16%) almost as high as online community (15%), “co-workers/students/pupils” (12%) and 3% don’t seem to like to talk about Lost.The main reasons to interact with the online community seem to be that it is fun (45,9%) and that the participants want to know how other people in the community feel about Lost (44,5%). It was a multiple choice question, and that is why the "percent of sample" make more than 100%.

Strength of Emotional Communication

The strength of emotional communication was calculated out of a score of the answers to 14 questions about emotional communication, on a scale from 1 (totally disagree) to 6 (totally agree).

This set of 14 questions was asked 4 times for these cases:

-offline communication while watching an episode (OFFTV)
-online communication with the online community while watching an episode (ONTV)
-offline communication in the time between two episodes (OFFB2)
-online communication with the online community in the time between two episodes (ONB2)

(a symbol explanation: M is the mean and is the strength of EC, SD is standard deviation (for the ones who don’t care about statistics – just ignore it;-)) and N is the number of the participants)

As you can see offline communication in the two phases has a very similar strength, the difference is not statistically relevant. But the difference between offline and online communication is highly significant (p<0,001 again: if not a statistician, ignore) as is the difference between online communication in the two phases. In other words people we know offline seem to be more significant for emotional communication than the online community. And the online communication with the online community while watching an episode seems least emotionally significant. You can see this difference between watching Lost with someone and interacting online even better in the following chart. The emotional communication is much stronger with every group of offline people than with the online community.


On the other hand the case is a little bit different, when we look at the situation of talking about Lost in the time between two episodes. Here the online community seems to be a more important communication partner than Co-worker/fellow student/fellow pupil, but still significantly less important than other groups of people.


The next table shows the group list emotional strength ratings based on statistical significance of the difference between groups (they share a rating, if the difference is not significant).

Gender, Culture and Non-Member Differences

There seems to be a big difference in the sample between different participant groups.

(reminder: offline communication while watching an episode (OFFTV), online communication with the online community while watching an episode (ONTV), offline communication in the time between two episodes (OFFB2), online communication with the online community in the time between two episodes (ONB2))

Depending on the fact if the participants feel like a part of the online community or not, the participants’ emotional communication is of different strength. The greatest gap between members and non-members is in the online communication (as one could expect). But it also seems that the non-members have a statistically significant weaker emotional communication even with the people offline.

In the graph you can see that there are differences between men and women. Only the difference in the strength of emotional communication while watching an episode is not statistically relevant – it seems that talking while watching Lost is similarly important for men and women.

The cultural difference seems to be amazing when German and USA participants are compared. It is highly significant in all 4 cases (p<0,001), the Germans seem to have weaker emotional communication about Lost. The difference between the English speaking countries doesn't seem to be that significant.
In the following table you can see the results of other countries (although there are not enough participants for the data to be statistically relevant).

(a symbol explanation: M is the mean and is the strength of EC, SD is standard deviation (for the ones who don’t care about statistics – just ignore it;-)) and N is the number of the participants)

Topics, activities and favourite aspects of Lost.

The favourite aspect of Lost for a great majority seems to be the Mystery/Unknown (63,7%), followed by the Characters (23,2%) and SF elements (6,8%).

Mystery also seems to be the most popular topic in all phases of online and offline communication, as well as are different theories. It was a multiple choice question.

(reminder: offline communication while watching an episode (OFFTV), online communication with the online community while watching an episode (ONTV), offline communication in the time between two episodes (OFFB2), online communication with the online community in the time between two episodes (ONB2))

Most of the participants read theories (55/90%), forums (64/79%), reviews (37/74%) and spoilers (37/58%) as well as watch videos (31/60%), when interacting online. But a lot less people seem to participate actively in the communication: write in forums (33/29%), chat (25/12%) or write theories (13%). It was a multiple choice question.

Death of a character

I also asked a short part about coping with a death of a liked character, but didn’t really get to use it in the thesis. Here are the results. Most people felt shocked (31%), sad (30%) or moved (17%).

The participants talked about it with a good friend (26%), family (19%), partner (18%) or didn’t talk about it (19%).

And after talking about it, the majority didn’t seem to feel different (57%).