Your Pal Skippy

Hi Everyone, I haven't checked these boards in a couple of weeks, and you can imagine my surprise to see that this thread is getting responses again after getting buried pretty far down in the topic list. I had intended to start writing in earnest on the third section of my article this evening, but it looks like I'll be pulling down these responses and putting them into Access instead. I've already completed and posted the Age and Gender section of the article, but will at some point amend it to reflect the additional responses. ILetThePoniesIn, I understand your misgivings and would like to address them. My article is not being written as a thesis or for any reasons other than my own personal interest. I studied data manipulation in college and thought I'd try my hand at a little amateur research design. I decided to look at Bronies for three reasons: 1.) I've seen a couple of episodes of the show and thought was kind of cute; 2.) I know absolutely nothing about Bronies save what I've read online and thought that this would be a chance to have my preconceptions challenged; and 3.) Bronies are "big" right now and therefore would likely have active message boards and thus a larger pool of potential respondents. I arrived at this forum by literally typing "Brony forum" into Google and making an account at the first site that was listed. I mentioned that I worked in social services purely in the interest of full-disclosure and this research is not in any way relatedto my work. I am not comparing the respondent data to control group or anything else, with the caveat that I did use Maeve Duggan and Joanna Brenner's Demographics of Social Media Users - 2012 to compare the rates of male and female social media use in the general population against the reported genders of the respondents to my survey. Videogameget, It's true that I often go for months at a time without updating the blog. It's also true that far larger surveys of the fandom (for example the 2012 State of the Herd Report) have already been undertaken. However, much of the reason that I've undertaken this project to learn more about the difficulties of research design (for example, many of my survey questions were obviously poorly worded, vague, or too open to interpretation, but that's a tale for another day), so simply reading other people's data or even attempting a meta-analysis of it wouldn't be helping me much. If you feel that I'm otherwise doing something methodologically untenable, interpreting responses in an unsound manner, or otherwise simply getting it wrong, please shoot me a PM. We can talk about things or even set up an interview so your voice can be heard in the finished product. In any event, thanks again to everyone who's responded! Regards, -Skippy

Hi everyone, I really appreciate that so many of you have taken the time to answer my questionnaire. I've been the cataloguing the responses as they are posted and am looking forward to generating some hard numbers about them. I'm already seeing some things I didn't expect (especially with regards to age clustering), which is great since I'm working on this project to try to get around the prevailing stereotypes of your group on the web. Ideally, I would like to get at least 50-60 responses to add a tiny bit of weight to my conclusions. By my count, as of this post I have 28 respondents, so I'm openly appealing to other members of the forum to chime in. Also, I'm currently working on a group of slightly more in-depth questions which I hope to have posted by the weekend, possibly in a seperate thread. Finally, if possible I'd like to do at least 2 or 3 one-on-one interviews to add some flavor to my project. If anyone would be interested in talking to me at length about their experiences and perceptions as part of the Brony community, please feel free to either send me a PM here on the forum or shoot me an e-mail at skippytheskeptic@gmail.com. Once again, thanks for everyone's help! Love and Peace, -Skippy (Edited to correct a spelling error.)

Hi Everybody, I’ve been referred this section of the forums as the most appropriate place for what I’m going to post. I’m currently mulling a (utterly non-scientific) blog article/series of articles about bronies as a subculture – see my thread in the Welcoming Plaza for more on that – and obviously that requires some input from bronies themselves. With that in mind, I’d like to post a short questionnaire here just to get a feel for the demographics of this forum as a representative sampling of bronies. Also included are some more open-ended questions that allow for more robust answers, which may be quoted in my article. Before that, however, I should probably give a little information about myself. I’m a social services worker with a background in political science. Perhaps more importantly, I’m an off-again, on-again blogger who writes rather haphazardly about pop culture, b-movies, and cultural skepticism. I’m also a frequent guest on the pop culture-centric comedy podcast Joe’s Awesome and Tommy Hates Everything. I am not a cultural anthropologist, however, and my interviewing skills are admittedly limited – my analytical training focused mostly on chunking huge amounts of data into SPSS and letting the computer do the heavy lifting. Please keep that in mind if my questions seem poorly constructed, leading, or otherwise subpar. 1.) How old are you? 2.) What is your level of educational attainment? 3.) What groups or cultural identities other than Brony do you self-identify with? 4.) What attracted you to MLP and brony culture? 5.) Do you consider MLP-related activities to be your primary hobby? 6.) What percentage of your leisure activities would you estimate are related to MLP? 7.) What portion of your friends also consider themselves bronies? 8.) If you have non-brony friends, are you ‘out’ as a brony to them? If so, has this affected your relationship with them in any way? 9.) Do you feel that bronies as a group are put upon or stigmatized on the internet? (Or society as a whole?) Those are the questions I have for now, although if the response to these questions is robust, I’ll likely be back with more questions about other aspects of brony culture. Once again, I’d like to extend my thanks in advance to everyone who chooses to participate. Love and Peace, -Skippy