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