The Fan and Amateur Fiction Survey

This survey is being carried out as an initial investigation into the views of different sections of the fan and amateur fiction community and the views of those people who are not necessarily in the community but have indirect contact with it.

The questions cover a number of areas:

• General information about respondent
• Information about the legal age of majority in their region
• Reading habits
• Social involvement in the fan/amateur fiction community
• Access and distribution of content
• Access and distribution of adult content
• Metadata preferences
• Non-readers/writers who come into contact with fan/amateur fiction
• Technology use

The first stage of the survey will run until January or until a thousand responses are received, whichever happens first. At that point the results will be analysed and published. The survey will continue running at that time and a second set of results will be harvested at a future point.

What do we hope to get out of it?

The analysis of the data is intended to answer a number of questions including but not limited to:

• How socially involved are people within the community?
• Is the social involvement different between the sub-groups of respondents?
• Is there concern about underage people accessing 'adult' content?
• Is there more concerned in certain sub-groups of the respondents?
• What ratings are concidered 'adult'?
• What steps are currently taken to regulate access?
• How do those people against whom those steps are taken feel about them?
• Are those steps necessary and/or effective?
• What metadata do people like to be connected with stories they read?
• Do specific sub-sections of the respondents prefer different amounts of metadata?
• What is the least amount of metadata people are interested in?
• What is the most amount of metadata people are interested in?
• What other information do they want to know?
• What technology do people use to access fan/amateur fiction?
• How important is the seperation of fan and real identities to members of the community?
• What information are people willing to give about themselves in return for archiving/access to content?
• Are some sub-sections of the respondents happy to give more information than others?

What do we hope to be able to give back to the community?

As stated on survey information page the questionnaire hopes to provide information that will "aid and support" the community as well as helping inform the initial designs for the applications that we hope will come out of this project. It is our hope that the results will be useful to those who store and publish fan and amateur content in terms of user preferences and requirements.

The Survey

The survey can be found at http://interaction.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ir/projects/ontofic/survey/