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Thursday, November 10

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ARS02

Researching The Hobbit –Results andMethodological Implementations of an International Project

S. Trültzsch-Wijnen

1

1

University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria

The World Hobbit Project, coordinated by Martin Baker, brought together researchers from 46 countries. Given to the diverse persons included in the net‑

work, the aims of the project and it outcomes are diverse accordingly. The researched aimed to get insights into the meaning of fantasy for individuals and

their individual perception of the role of the genre for society and culture nowadays. Therefore the Hobbit movies served as prominent example: Getting

to know the meaning of these movies for the audience including detailed information on making sense of it in the daily life of individuals, can serve to

answer the general role of fantasy. Accordingly the research aimed, beside the movies themselves, the relation between movies and book, meaning of fan‑

tasy, genre classification but also general cultural and media habits of the probands and so on. With a range of questions not only the meaning and sense

making of the movies and book but also the wider context of fantasy and Tolkien’s works within the individuals subjective lifeworld was aimed. In order to

gain such insights quantitative and qualitative methods were combined in an unorthodox way. An online questionnaire combined closed and open ended

questions at the same time. The two sorts of data allow exploring quantitative results as overview and in depth perspectives with the qualitative aspects.

While the quantitative analysis is completed by most national teams, the qualitative data still undergo analysis and interpretation due to the high number

of responses depending on the language. The international cooperation allows comparing und discussing results from audiences with different cultural

backgrounds. The panel includes presentations focussing on both results and methodological issues. Since the Danish Team additionally recruited a repre‑

sentative sample, they can compare and evaluate the sample of the questionnaire addressed by the research team in general, which consists mainly of fans

and enthusiasts. The different readings of The Hobbit and the relation to Tolkien’s work are subject to presentations from Austria, Denmark, The Nederlands,

Belgium and Portugal. Results for these national samples will be presented and compared with each other and the overall sample. Additionally one presen‑

tation identifies a typology of viewers combining both quantitative and qualitative data.

PN 055

Fantasy and Reality: “Hobbit” Viewer Types and How They Connect the Movie with Their Everyday Lives

U. Hasebrink

1

, I. Paus-Hasebrink

2

, J. Kulterer

2

1

University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

2

University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria

The question that stands at the core of the proposed presentation is how viewers of “The Hobbit” relate the symbolic resources of the movies to their ev‑

eryday lives. In a first step, based on standardised indicators for the appreciation, fan-orientation and genre-related framing of the“Hobbit”movie, we will

identify types of viewers. This step will be performed by means of cluster analyses on the basis of the global sample of the World Hobbit Research Project.

In a second step we will investigate to what extent these viewer types are related to the country and to individual and socio-demographic characteristics.

This step will provide“objective”indicators for the connection between viewers’everyday lives and their“Hobbit”experience. In a third step we will analyse

“subjective” indicators for this connection, i.e. how these viewer types connect the movie with their everyday life, be it with respect to the general issues

that are raised by the movie, be it with regard to personal characteristics that shape their viewing experience. This step will be done for the Austrian and

German sub-sample only; it will be based on a quantitative content analysis of all respondents’open answers regarding general issues and personal char‑

acteristics, and on a subsequent qualitative analysis of selected answers that shed light on the connection between the viewer types’ everyday lives and

their“Hobbit”experience.

PN 056

Methodological Constructions of Experiences of The Hobbit: A Comparison of Insights Obtained Through Different Types of Respondent

Sampling

K.C. Schrøder

1

, A. Jerslev

2

1

Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

2

University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

The worldwide survey of the experiences of The Hobbit trilogy (spring 2015) enables the participating researchers from 46 countries to explore the recep‑

tion of these international blockbusters from a variety of perspectives to do with global audiences, national readings, language cultures, gender, age, etc.

The research carried out in Denmark additionally enables the researchers to analyze in detail the consequences of adopting two different kinds of sampling

strategies: In Denmark, in addition to the online self-selected sample, we also had a market research company recruit a controlled sample, which is repre‑

sentative of Danish cinema-goers. Each sample comprises app. 550 respondents. These two samples filled out identical questionnaires. This enables us to

explore the methodological consequences of building one’s reception analysis on, respectively, a sample representative of ‘ordinary’ Danish cinema-goers

and a sample arising from the recruiting efforts of the researchers through networks in social media, mainly Facebook. At a first glance, the network-based

self-selected sample can be seen as a population consisting of more committed and enthusiastic people than non-committals.The comparison will consider

both reception-methodological and reception-experiential insights, exploring the experiential differences between the representative sample and a self-re‑

cruited population with an overrepresentation of Hobbit fans recruited fromTolkien fan communities, high-school students invited by their teacher to fill out

the online questionnaire, and other socio-cultural groupings. As a first analytical step, we shall characterize the two samples based on their demographic

profiles. Next, based both on the closed and the more qualitative questions in the questionnaire, we shall do a comparative analysis of their responses to

the experience-oriented questions, such as their motivations for seeing the films, what genre-labels they would attach to the films, their perception of fan‑

tasy fiction, their having read The Hobbit novel, etc. These variables will be analyzed in relation to gender, age, and education. In addition to shedding light

on the diverse readings and experiences of a global blockbuster film (trilogy), the article will be valuable to the research community for its systematical

illumination of the methodological consequences of applying different sampling strategies in cultural research.