Random thoughts on my dissertation progress
A good friend today said that the real purpose of my dissertation is this: The use of quantitative data methods can be used to analyze sport fandom.
This perspective is very much appreciated as sometimes, when I’m looking at this data and explaining what it means, I tend to look down on it as almost all the work that I’ve seen and almost all of the media coverage that I’ve seen is for qualitative research. Qualitative is awesome in some ways. It is easy to frame a narrative around specific individuals. You can easily take pictures. With quantitative data, it is much harder to frame that narrative. It gets even harder when your quantitative approach is entirely online. This issue can be depressing.
The focus of my dissertation is still demographic, geographic and social characteristics of Australian sport fans online. The analysis just needs a framework to present it. This includes why patterns in fannish behavior change (or don’t). How do you measure change? You hope you have data before an event takes place and then you get data after the event. Did the pattern of membership change? Did the population’s geographic characteristics change? Did the demographic characteristics change? I’ve got a few chapters done. They include the response to the Melbourne Storm controversy, the Jason Akermanis controversy and the Joel Monaghan controversy. I have a few potential micro-chapters. They include Soccer World Cup checkin patterns, how Julia Gillard impacted the Western Bulldogs, and what AFL team was more popular in the North Territory using Google search results totals. Beyond that, I have the data to look at the development of the Greater Western Sydney. These particular situations can help explain what is happening in sport fandom, what the existing communities for these fandoms look like and how they are shaped by controversy. (Hint: Most of the time, major events don’t appear to change the fundamental demographic and geographic characteristics of a fandom. Other events tend to be at play.)
One of the frustrating things about my particular research area is that it can be hard to talk to people about it. To get a lot of it, you have to know a lot about social media across several different sites, to generally understand how sport fandom operates (and how it differs from media fandom.) and then understand how a particular sport fandom works. How do people use YouTube? How does the sport fandom on YouTube use it? What are the fundamental characteristics of a particular fandom manifested on YouTube and are they manifested in a similar way on YouTube or does Youtube present a unique subgroup of fans? This type of approach is just different. It isn’t a usability study. (Though yes, usability can and does play a role in how communities get together on the Internet. If there are barriers to entry, the population may be “abnormal” and not as representative.) It isn’t content analysis. (Though that’s a legitimate method of critique. That methodology tends to be similar to traditional media fandom studies.) It is a population study. This approach just isn’t generally done. When I talk to a lot of people, it feels like I need to present a lot of back story in order to get understanding. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It helps me refine my thoughts and my thinking. It just gets frustrating in that I can’t sit down with people and start discussing these things. (Which is probably the case for a lot of PhD students. You’re the specialist in your area. You should be going deeper than anyone else has on your subject. If it was easy for everyone to understand, then some one would have done research on it already.)
So yeah. At the moment, I’m a bit frustrated. I don’t necessarily feel like I’m making progress. I feel like I’m drowning in data. I can’t always figure out how to provide context and narrative to make my research more compelling and easily understandable to stakeholders and casual fans.
