Based on what I had learned about narratives and having witnessed an online community using them, I developed a plan for a case study in which I would gather quantitative and qualitative data to see if I was right about my approach.
The first step was a pre-study, in which I outlined a historical overview of the first year of the Nerdfighter community, and identified its most prominent narratives and themes. The second part was an online survey, with both open and closed-ended questions, to obtain both qualitative and quantitative data from participants. In this way, I was able to perform statistical analysis to test my model, as well as content analysis on responses, which allowed me to contextualize my findings.
Pre-study
With the aim of identifying the major themes, narratives and cultural artifacts found in the history of this community, I went through the first 257 videos that make up the Brotherhood 2.0 project and outlined it through themes and narratives. I wrote about the most prominent ones in a series of posts you can see here.
The results showed that the Nerdfighter community does indeed have narratives that have been formative of its culture and that many cultural artifacts have emerged from them. As for narrative features, the most recurring ones exposed breach of canonicity, referentiality and genericness, particularities, and intentional state entailment.
The results also served as guide to select two specific successful activities that could be used as indicators of participation for this research. The Kiva Lending Team and the Project for Awesome 2012 were selected, as they appeared to be widely recognized activities in which participation could be measured by asking participants to self-report one of various specific actions. In the Kiva Lending Team, community members can participate by lending any amount of money to a project, and/or by helping organize the team’s efforts to reach a lending goal by taking a moderator or leader role on the Nerdfighters’ platform at Kiva.org. (Since this is an ongoing effort, only participation in the six months previous to the survey were taken into account.) In the Project for Awesome, participation included making a P4A video, donating money to the Foundation to Decrease World Suck, and/or voting for a P4A video so that a promoted charity receive the collected funds.
Main study: Narratives and Participation
For the main study, I designed an online survey that was divided in five parts with both scales and open-ended questions:
- General demographics
- Awareness of the community and its culture
- Identification and sense of community*
- Participation in culture formation
- Participation in community successes
*This part contains items of a scale developed specifically to measure sense of community according to McMillan and Chavis George’s dimensions of Needs fulfillment, Membership, Influence, and Emotional connection, adapted to fit this case.
I used the quantitative data to test three hypotheses based on a sense of community, participation, and narratives:
Hypothesis 1:The higher the sense of community, the more likely members are to participate in culture formation through narrative accrual.
Hypothesis 2a:Members who participate in collective narrative accrual are likely to participate in community successes.
Hypothesis 2b:Members who participate in collective narrative accrual are more likely to participate in community successes than those who do not.
Hypothesis 3:Members with a higher sense of community are more likely to participate in community successes.
You can see the model I was testing and the results here.
The findings and implications are summarized in this post.
Participants
On May 23, 2013, I posted the survey on four platforms in which Nerdfighters gather online: two separate Facebook closed groups, the Nerdfighters’ subreddit, and a post reblogged by an official Nerdfighter tumblr account. All of these four platforms are run by volunteers who have decided to either gather with other Nerdfighter according to interest or location (in the case of the Facebook groups), or who want to have a central meeting point for Nerdfighters within larger sites (in the case of reddit or tumblr.)
After 20 hours of posting an invitation to participate with a link to the online survey to each of the four platforms, over 2,000 people filled out the survey. Because the analysis compared members who reported having participated in either the Kiva Lending Team in the six months previous the survey or in the Project for Awesome 2012, respondents who reported having found the community in 2013 were removed from the sample, leaving a total of 2,028 respondents.
Out of these 2,028 participants, 78.5% were female, 19.8% male, and 1.7% reported other gender, and the average age of the participants was 19. The majority of participants, 42.4%, were either in high school or had finished it, 35% were or had finished university at an undergraduate level, 9.6% were in middle university at a graduate level, and 6.3% were in middle school.
People from over 60 different countries participated, 69.2% were from the United States, followed by 9.3% from Canada, 4.1% from the United Kingdom, 3.3% from Australia, 1.6% from Brazil, and 1.1% from the Philippines. The rest of the countries accounted for smaller percentages, but they are all listed in the table below.
Groups for comparison
In order to make comparisons among groups, participants were asked to report if they had participated in the Nerdfighter Kiva Lending team (by either lending money to a project or by helping organize the group) or in the Project for Awesome 2012 (by making a P4A video, donating to the project or voting for a charity.) Participants who reported either of these activities were tallied as members who participate in community successes, and those who reported not having participated in either were counted as not having participated. This allowed for comparison when running statistical analysis.
In total, 1,073 participants responded to the questions about participation, out of which 61.4% reported having participated in either one or both of the activities, and 38.6% reported not having participated in either.
Community engagement
Participants were asked if they participated in online platforms as members of the Nerdfighter community to interact with other Nerdfighters, and 84.7% reported they did. The figure below shows the most named platforms named by participants, with YouTube, Tumblr and Facebook being the top three most used.
Most used platforms by Nerdfighters.
Community embers interacting among each other in different platforms is a clear indicator of their investment in each other and their emotional bonds.
Content analysis of open responses
Part of the survey included open-ended questions about membership activities, shared values, narratives identified by participants, and reasons for sharing them. I got a random sample of 304 surveys to do content analysis. You can see the results from the content analysis through this series of posts and through the table below.
See analysis by theme:
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