EXO EXO-L Survey Results
- Livia
- Mar 30, 2019
- 25 min read
Overview:
For those who've been here before, welcome back and to new readers: a warm welcome! This is my second analysis and I hope y'all will enjoy it! And fair warning, be prepared to be here a while because this one is all over the place.
Before we get right to it, I'll be explaining a few things about this analysis. You are welcome to skip this section if you're not interested, but it might help clarify a few things if I do not mention it for each section.
The results of this survey in no way are meant to be taken as a point of fact. Statistics are meant to be a tool used to predict results, within a reasonable amount of uncertainty.
All of this data is qualitative which made certain analysis extremely difficult. I did the best that I could, but please understand that because this is qualitative, and not quantitative, certain tools of statistical analysis have been omitted.
The programs used in this were MicroSoft Excel (where the data was compiled) and R (a statistical analysis tool used to create the graphs).
This analysis will mainly focus on the Members in comparison to everything else. I felt that this was a good stopping point and its a point in question that most people are interested.
Please note that some of the sections do not receive nearly as much analysis as I usually do. This is because with this bare analysis this entire survey yields a monster of data and I did not want to overwhelm you all. Also, EXO is not one of my main groups, so I don't know as much about them as I do for BTS or VIXX.
Shortcomings of this project:
As you will see later that the distribution of my data is not ideal. Part of the reason for this is that I was fighting the influence of what I call "Data Ghettos" that social media site puts each user into. For this reason, you see the influence on my demographics (located in the USA, primarily an English speaker, early 20s, caucasian).
The primary chart type for this presentation unfortunately is the Pie Chart. The pie chart does not do a good job of allowing us to compare multiple proportions against each other, unlike a bar plot. Unfortunately, I was unable to get R to present me with a clear bar plot (that is, it would not allow me to manipulate the graph in such a way that someone other than myself could understand what it was presenting).
One of the biggest issues of this survey is the lack of data. This one was open for a while I promoted, I believe, rather aggressively but was unable to obtain the 500 data entries I typically require as a minimum. While the number is semi-arbitrary, I settled on this number as it a reasonably obtainable number for a sample of an unknown, but very large population (ex. any sort of population of fans). Because I did not reach this minimum there is a greater level of uncertainty. This uncertainty will be reflected in my results and discussions.
And once again, there is was very little response as well from fans in Korea, so practically all of this data is based on international fan data.
Full disclosure: I have some personal issues with SM Entertainment. I will not go into detail about that because this is not the place for this. But this is a warning if I do come across as hostile in my analysis. I would like to maintain neutrality so please let me know if my analysis comes across as biased and I will try to fix it.
There is a lot I did not analyze, that could've. But at that point, there was no way I was going to get this project done in a long weekend. At that point this would have been essentially a job work load since I do this alone. And too much analysis is not necessarily helpful, so I mostly focused on what I think people would be the most interested in.
Any other shortcomings of this project will be mentioned in each section as they will be section specific.
Members:
General:
This is probably one of the biggest talking points of discussions that I have come across: Who is the most popular member of any group? Well, here are the numbers:
D.O. ---- 93
Chanyeol ---- 66
Xiumin ---- 65
Baekhyun ---- 63
Chen ---- 58
Lay ---- 46
Kai ---- 35
Sehun ---- 34
Suho ---- 28
A trend that I hope to confirm after running several surveys is to confirm whether or the Hyung Line (older half of a group) are in the top positions of popularity. In EXO's case there seems to be a partiality towards the middle group for the most part. I can't be as confident as I'd like to be with this because I did not obtain my minimum of 500 data points. I do however believe that this is a relatively accurate representation of the majority population of where I got my information (this will be discussed in a later section).
Another quick note I'd like to talk about is that I've added a section where I asked why fans might like a particular member, so for this section, I'll be talking about reasons for popularity that are based on exposure and the like.
Something I would like to bring up is something I want to explore further over my next several surveys. I have theory that I'm going to call the "Leader Fallacy." It's where the leader of the group's numbers are inflated. I believe that there is inflation for two reasons:
The leader is the face of the group, people are more likely to gravitate towards them for this reason.
If they are a casual fan, or they can't pick a favorite, they may unconsciously pick the leader as they are a safe and established point of reference.
In the case of EXO on the international level, this is not the case, in fact it's the opposite. I was a bit surprised to find out that Suho was the leader. And the more research I did (ok, YouTube videos and the likes) I started figuring out why. The reasons I've been able to come up with are as follows:
Overall as a group, EXO does not have that great of English speaking skills. This is very much the case for Suho. So when they do do interviews in English, while he does try to guide the discussions, he doesn't do a lot of speaking. If I were to ranking English speaking abilities, I would probably put Lay (who is fluent), D.O. and Chen towards the top. This also indicates there might be a correlation between Popularity and English speaking abilities.
I think another contributing factor is his method of leading. Suho tends not to put himself at the very center, unlike some other groups (Ex. N of VIXX and RM of BTS). The reason I think it's this way is that he has group members that are very comfortable being the center of attention and seeking it out. The majority of BTS and VIXX aren't particularly comfortable with attention unless they're preforming. So in their cases, the leaders try to deflect the attention away from those who are uncomfortable to either themselves or to another member that is more comfortable. Suho doesn't necessarily need to do this all the time, in most cases, they will do this themselves name. Suho takes on more of a 'motherly' approach to leading rather than a 'fatherly' approach where he focuses more on the one-on-one interactions and emotional health of the members rather than reputation and actions. This more 'motherly' approach leaves him with less opportunities to demonstrate to the public his leading abilities.
This last point is probably the biggest factor as to why Suho ranks so low with the international fans: his exposure is incredibly low. For international fans, the majority of the exposure that we get is the exposure that SM Entertainment puts out or approves of. So this is going to be music videos, promos, interviews, etc. For Suho, there is little exposure in comparison to the others, particularly in exposure of music videos, and independent project promotions (Such as when he was in the play, 'The Laughing Man'). When there is exposure, its often for a short amount of time.
I do believe that though he is much more popular in Korea as they have more direct interactions, more direct exposure, and reputation, if the number of posts on Twitter in Korean about him are any indicator.
So instead of saying that Suho (based on who he is) himself disproves my "Leader Fallacy", the conditions under which he is leader takes him out of the conditions needed for him to fit in the "Leader Fallacy": For international fans, he is not the face of the group and for casual fans, is not obvious who is the leader. To me, this is the exception that proves the rule.
I've focused quite a bit on Suho, so I'll be moving on now to the other members.
For the two youngest members, Kai and Sehun, they do follow the trend of where they are not the most popular. In the case of Sehun, because he is the youngest, it would make sense for him to have the least exposure, I do believe he was still in high school when they started out, so from a stand point of time, Sehun would practically not have been able to have as much exposure as the others. As far as independent work, he has very little outside of EXO, so there is not a lot of exposure there. For Kai, I was little surprised by the small number. Considering the fact that he is the Center and Visual of the group, in their earlier works, he had a lot of exposure on the front of music videos. But on the other hand, he doesn't have a lot of other independent projects. And there is a possibility of the Dispatch drama that happened earlier this year being a contributing factor.
D.O. was not entirely a surprise to be ranked so highly. In the music videos, he has a lot of exposure, he has better English skills than most of the group, and he is a prolific actor. So in terms of exposure towards international fans. And based on where the majority of the data came from, it makes sense for that particular population to be drawn towards his personality. Another contributing factor is that the most reblogs, retweets, and private messages I got were from D.O. fan accounts. For whatever reason they are the most active on social media it seems.
Chanyeol was expected to be also ranked highly for similar reasons as D.O. I think that he did not rank higher than D.O. because his English skills are lacking and has not has ask much acting experience as D.O..
Xiumin was a bit of surprise for me as he has less exposure in music videos in comparison to the other members, but because he's the oldest, the length of exposure has been longer, which proves to be a bit of a dichotomy. The biggest reason that I believe he performed as highly as he did was that given the main source of data, the users of that site tend to gravitate towards personalities like Xiumin. A contributing factor (that will be shown the next subsection) that I believe also contributes to this is his subunit work with Baekhyun and Chen (EXO CBX).
Baekhyun was lower than expected given his very upbeat personality, the amount of exposure, and his independent works. Once again, I think this can be chalked up to lack of data and the source of the majority of the data.
I expected Chen to be somewhere in the middle as his exposure is not as prolific as some of the other members, but he does have the added advantage of better English skills and his independent works. The announcement of his solo debut did not appear to influence the inflow of data.
For Lay he actually ended up being where I expected him to be. As far as his exposure in relation to the other members of EXO, he probably has the lowest. But he makes up for this lack of exposure by being very active in his independent works and communicating with international fans.
Why:
This is a new section that was very much an experiment. For the first 50 or so responses, I had people type in why they liked a particular member the most. From there, I created the responses from there. For this I limited the number of reason that could be picked to 5 or less. One of the things I was very worried about was people picking all of them. By picking all of the choices that are applicable for a particular member, it makes it difficult for me to do any constructive analysis. Also since I have to type and convert the data by hand, I would have ended up with so much data that not only would I have possibly overwhelmed my program (and hard drive) I probably would have ended up aggravating the tendons in my wrist most than I already have. So from my stand point, limiting the responses to 5 was for practicality.
Let me do a brief explanation of what each choice indicates:
1st Impression: Group : For this one, for any people this the person that really left an impact on them when they first discovered the group.
1st Impression: Kpop : For some, EXO was their first group and therefore this was the first person that left an impression on them or this was the first person that left an impression on them from this genre.
Discovery: This is going to be the member that they first took notice of. However, this may not be the same member that left an impression on them when they first learned of the group but there is a bit of crossover according to the data.
Voice: Self explanatory.
Leadership: The leadership skills demonstrated by the leader. While I'm sure other members have the leadership skills, I wanted to limit this to the one that is truly in that position.
Personality: Self explanatory.
Humor: Self explanatory.
Talent: Self explanatory.
Solo/Subunit: Solos and Subunits have different focuses than the work done by the main group, so if someone prefer that member's solo or subunit works then it would be a contributing factor to why that member is preferred.
Similarity: As human beings we're drawn to those we share similar characteristics with (this can be ethnicity, sex, personality, etc.) so for many, this is a drawing point.
Dance: Self explanatory.
Work Ethic: This one was hard to decide on but I decided to include it because many are drawn to hard workers, to those who overcome difficult things and I believe this category reflects that.
Appearance: Self explanatory.
Ideal Type: I feel that this is self explanatory, but if it is not, please contact me and I will go ahead and fix it.
Acting Career: Many of them have acting experience and people may be drawn to them because of their work or discovered them through a drama or the likes.
Positive Life Impact: Life is hard and sometimes we need something to help bring us out of our slums. This can be through music. It can be through the inspiring actions of another.
Other: If there was another reason why that a particular member is a favorite but the reason is not listed then user could type that in. Full disclosure, if the answer could be recategorized into one of the other choices, I did it.
Prefer not to say: This is for those who left this section blank/did not choose an option. This is something that can happen with multi choice questions and fill ins.
As seen in the pie chart below, the three biggest contributors overall to reasons for popularity are Personality, Talent, and Voice. This pie chart displays the overall reasoning for why a member is chosen.
This next chart displays visually the relative frequencies as to why a member is chosen as a favorite. Unfortunately its hard to see the relative percentages in relation to each other. After the relative frequencies table, I have provided pie charts for the percentages of contribution for each member.
(Slideshow):
So while the pie charts do give a good representation of the percentages for each member they do not however demonstrate the percentages overall. Below I've provided two tables show casing how everything is relative to each other.
The first table is the Raw Data. It's a little difficult to tell, but the bolded numbers indicate the largest number for that category. For instance, for the 'Humor' column, The number 23 is bolded, indicating that D.O. had the highest number of votes for that category. The yellow cells are the categories with highest number of votes per member. For example, for Kai, the highest number of votes for any category is in 'Dance' with 22 votes. The greyed out cells are cells that did not get votes.
The second table is the Percentages in Relation to the Grand Total. Whatever number was in a certain cell, that number was then divided by the grand total of 1,966 entries to get the percentages. Once again the greyed out cells indicate that there was no responses. The green cells, excluding the 'Total' row, were highlighted to indicate that they contributed to more than 1% of the data collected. For the 'Total' row, the cells were highlighted if the category contributed to more than 10% of the data.
Looking at the raw data and the overall percents, I believe that it is easy to see that Personality, Talent, and Voice are the leading conscious reasons as to why people would chose that particular member as their favorite. As a side note for those who are curious, the Other responses for D.O. and Sehun were 'variety shows' (I felt that it belonged truly to neither Acting Career nor Humor) and 'love and support for fanboys' (to me this deserves its own thing), respectively.
Countries:
Before I begin with this one, I just want you guys to know, this section took me the longest to try to analyze. Because of the number of different country response (60 different countries) I have presented the data in two different way (since R could not produce a clean pie chart with this many responses):
The first is a table with all the countries in alphabetical order. If the country comprised of 1% or more of the data submitted, I highlighted it in green.
The second is a bar graph of the frequencies of each country. I apologize for the small font of the bar graph. It is also presented in alphabetical order.
Favorite Member for the Top Two Countries:
A key point in statistical analysis having a large enough sample size to represent a population. I have chosen to go with the rule of thumb of a minimum sample size of 30 to prediction a population. There were only two countries from which I got 30 or more responses: Canada and the USA. I will not do a detailed analysis of these charts as they are self explanatory and are kind of a repetition of the "Members" section above.
(Slideshow):
Ethnicity:
This was a very interesting section to create. This was a question that allowed multiple choice, I allowed unto three options. For this one, since it was a bit of an experiment, I ended up having to rework some of the answer choices. If a generic category and its subcategory were both selected, I put it down under the more specific category (Ex. Caucasian and Western Caucasian). For the Slavic and Baltic answers, I was informed that my understanding of those ethnicities was incorrect. Since they were sub-ethnicities of caucasian I recategorized them as Caucasian. Because no country consistently defines ethnicity, I had to come up with some of my own. I tried to find a middle ground between being generic and be specific. I wanted to add a few more options for Asian and African ethnicities by the more I researched the more I came across conflicting information and a lot information on very niche ethnicities (Ex. Tamil vs. Punjabi vs. Nepalese for South Asian sub-ethnicities). If you have any suggestions, please let me know I'll see about trying to work it in.
First, here is the break down on single answer ethnicities. Considering the locations of where I got most of my data, I found this data to be diverse.
African ---- 7
African Heritage ---- 23
North African ---- 3
Caucasian ---- 99
East Asian ---- 24
Hispanic ---- 46
Mediterranean ---- 28
Middle Eastern/Arab ---- 3
Mixed ---- 53
Scandinavian ---- 6
South Asian/Indian ---- 25
Southeast Asian ---- 54
Western Caucasian ---- 92
Prefer not to Answer ---- 15
Next is the popularity per ethnicity. For this one I was not entirely sure about how to go about analyzing given that most of the ethnicities were at less than 30 data points. But overall there seems to be a similar distribution to the overall popularity. This to me shows that there is no significant correlation between favorite member and ethnicity.
Here is the breakdown of ethnicities of those who are mixed for those that are curious.
African ---- 6
North African ---- 3
Caucasian ---- 19
East Asian ---- 16
Hispanic ---- 24
Mediterranean ---- 4
Middle Eastern/Arab ---- 4
Native American ---- 21
Pacific Islander ---- 2
Scandinavian ---- 2
South Asian/Indian ---- 3
Southeast Asian ---- 7
Western Caucasian ---- 10
Gender:
This section was highly predictable. It was expected for the majority of participants to identify as Female. At this macro-level, there is not much for me to discuss. I will however will discuss the popularity of each member for each of the gender options. For this one, I created it as a multi-level question, finding the middle ground between identity and biological sex. Female is for those who were born and identify as female. Male is for those who were born and identify as male. Transgendered is for those who were born as one sex but identify as the other. Initially I planned on distinguishing between male-to-female and female-to-male, but with how little data I had gotten, I felt like there wasn't going to be enough there for me to analyze. Other is for those who identify as something else completely. Similarly to transgendered, I wanted to add more options but for the sake of practicality I left it as simply other. Prefer not to answer is self-explanatory.
Female ---- 430
Male ---- 7
Transgendered ---- 13
Other ---- 21
Prefer not to answer ---- 17
As always, it shouldn't come as a surprise that females make up the majority of fans. Below is chart dislaying the relative frequencies. I think that if given more data, it be clearer to see if there is a trend.
Normally, I do a discussion for each pie chart for each of the genders but this time, I feel that the lack of data doesn't give me enough to work with. But for now, it's apparent that female population clearly defines the member popularity.
(Slideshow):
Song:
I'll first list out the tracks and their totals then I'll give a little insight into what I saw then I'll present the graphs. Let me say this now, my survey for VIXX, gave me a false sense of how easy it is to find out which songs are lead tracks, so I'm probably missing some songs for this list, 'cause your girl is no longer sure what makes a lead track anymore.
For deciding what was a lead track I cross referenced popularity on iTunes with what there were was an official MV for (the only exception to this is The Eve which had such a huge popularity on iTunes despite there being no official MV, I decided to include it anyways).
This was kinda predicable. With Monster being one of the most viewed EXO songs on YouTube, it came as no surprise for it being almost 25% of fan's favorite song. KoK Bop, Growl, Wolf, and Lotto were kind of predictable as being much lower on popularity as I know that there's quite a few jokes made about them within the fandom. I was however surprised to find MAMA and Power to be ranked as low as they are. The only reason I can think of as to why this is is that both of these songs have long, of putting voiced intros in the music videos. I think that those intros can be very off putting especially to new fans. The Eve was also a surprise for me. I know that it is a very popular song but the lack of official music video is part of the reason why its not ranked so highly. There were relatively where I figured they'd be because of the number of views I've seen on YouTube.
Is there a trend between favorite song and favorite member?
I though that this would be a fun new section since I figured out how to make these graphs properly. To answer the question, kind of. For the songs that received more than 30 votes, I think we can see a trend, for instance, Sehun is giving D.O. a run for his money in Overdose and KoKO Bop. But overall, there seems to be a similar distribution of favorite member versus as compared to to the overall popularity. I do this graph though is self explanatory, so not much analysis is needed from me.
Platform:
This was more of something for myself to keep track of. I only created a chart of this in case anyone was curious where I got my data from.
Email ---- 1
Friends ---- 1
Other Survey ---- 4
Tumblr ---- 393
Twitter ---- 89
I also decided to give looking a popularity for each platform a try. I only created charts for Tumblr and Twitter as they each earned more than 30 votes.
For Tumblr, D.O. and Chanyeol were the most popular. I think thins can be contributed to both the fact that they have personalities that the type of Tumblr users are drawn to their personalities. I also found that fan blogs of these two members were more likely to directly respond to my inquiries about this survey, so that could also be a contributing factor.
For Twitter, Chen is the most popular. I think this has to do with his more upbeat personality. Otherwise, I'm not entirely sure why. I also checked the dates of when I got my Twitter responses and the announcement of his solo coming out soon. Most of the responses I got from Twitter were before the announcement so I do not think this contributed to it all that much.
(Slideshow):
Age:
This one had a similar problem to the "Country" section: a large variety of results. Therefore I've set it up in a similar fashion: a chart with the raw numbers and as a bar graph showing the relative frequencies.
The results of this one were pretty predictable with the majority of takers being in their late-teens and early 20's.
As you can see below, age is a quantitative set of data, which allows me to get down into the a little more nitty-gritty analysis. Below are the numbers that I calculated. After these numbers I will explain what they mean and a few more thing about the graph below. I understand that it's a little too technical, so if you're confused at all, you're welcome to skip, this is just for those who would like to know a little more about what's going on in the chart.
Mean: 20.52
Median: 20
Standard Deviation: 4.37
1st Standard Deviation Range: [16.15, 24.89]
2nd Standard Deviation Range: [11.78, 29.26]
3rd Standard Deviation Range: [7.41, 33.63]
95% Confidence Interval of the Mean: [20.20, 20.85]
Because the mean (average) and median (middle) are pretty similar, I can draw the conclusion that the data is close to being normally distributed. The data is skewed to the right, but the weight of the left does balance it out, allowing for a mostly normal distribution. The 1st Standard Deviation Range (where 68.3% of the data lies) is between 16.15 and 24.89. The 2nd Standard Deviation Range (where 95.5% of the data lies) is between 11.78 and 29.26. The 3rd Standard Deviation Range (where 99.7% of the data lies) is between 7.41 and 33.63. With a 95% level of confidence, the true mean of the entire population is between the ages of 20.20 and 20.85.
Now I will move onto a question that people will be more interested: who is the most popular with which age group? I will first do this doing the raw data, but will look at this again in the next section in a slightly clearer way. In the graphs below, I have this set up in a box and whisker plot.
How to interpret a Box and Whisker Plot:
The dark middle line in the box represents the median for that given subset. The box around that line are the lower and upper 25% percent (also known as the quantiles). The relative size of these sections indicates the dispersion, i.e. the smaller the area, the more values are in that range and vice versa. The lines, or "whiskers" are the upper and lower extremes. These are the reasonable extremes that R has determined. The dots indicate outliers, because of the sample size, there is to be expected large number of outliers.
Age Distribution of Fans per Member:
As you can see, the median age for each member is roughly the same. Interestingly enough, it seems that Suho is more popular with younger fans than with older ones. The same goes for Chanyeol. For the most part, the members' dispersions are relatively even, even if slightly skewed towards the younger half. Baekhyun is the only one with dispersion skewed towards his older fans. I find this curious because if his boyish charms. D.O. is the most popular with older fans considering the number of outliers he has.
Age Distribution of Fans per Lead Track:
For songs it is a bit less clean cut. While their median ages do focus around a similar median age as to the members, there is more variation, especially in dispersion. I am going to leave out an analysis for this one beyond what I have said as I can't seem to find a rhyme or reason as to why these dispersions have worked out the way they have.
(Slideshow):
Age Groups:
Because of the wide range of ages and the volume, I elected to group them as the following to figure out who is the most popular with what age group.
15 year olds and younger ---- 42
16 - 20 year olds ---- 233
21 - 25 year olds ---- 159
26 - 30 year olds ---- 34
31 - 35 year olds ---- 17
36 year olds and older ---- 3
(Slideshow):
15 year olds and Younger:
While not the largest age group, I believe this one to be most telling. It seems to me that this age group is partial towards the ones that are more approachable.
16 - 20 year olds:
As the largest age group this reflects the overall popularity distribution well.
21 - 25 year olds:
As the second largest age group, this is almost identical to the largest age group.
26 - 30 year olds:
[Here, we begin to see a bit of a divergence, with Xiumin and Kai becoming the most popular. I believe these two become more popular because as far personalities are concerned they're very different from their appearances. While both are very striking and, well, sexy, they both have a sweeter disposition which I think would draw in this age group.
31 - 35 year olds:
Once again we see a disparity, this time with Sehun completely disappearing from the choices and Xiumin and D.O. appearing to be the most popular. I think this once again comes down to a sweeter disposition. But I cannot stand by this prediction as I received less than 30 votes.
36 year olds and Older:
So this one is a little unfair as I only had three entries for this group. But I wanted to include it anyways to be fair to everything.
(Slideshow):
Region:
Like last time, I also did analysis based on region to give a fair look into each area. I feel that the graph below is pretty self explanatory. After all, I think the fact that over 80% of the votes come from locations that speak either English as their primary language or its one of the most spoken languages really contributes to the popularity distribution that we see. The slideshow only indicated the regions that received more than 30 votes.
Africa ---- 3
East Asia ---- 41
Europe ---- 156
North America ---- 234
Oceania ---- 12
South America ---- 28
West Asia ---- 14
East Asia:
This one surprised me quite a bit (though to be fair I did have very little data collected from the big cultural three: China, Korea, and Japan). Culturally, it's normal for the Hyung Line to be the most popular, so it really strikes me as odd that it didn't necessarily work out that way. Once again, I believe this has to do with exposure.
Europe:
This one is definitely more in line with what has been seen overall.
North America:
Similar pattern to Europe since these two regions were the most populous.
(Slideshow):
Fan Duration:
This is a new section that I've added. And quite honestly, it came out better than expected.
The point of this section is to get an idea of how long someone has been a fan.
Year:
Based on the chart below we can see that the majority of people have become fans of EXO in 2017. The best I could figure as to why there was a spike in 2017 was that it was 5 years after they debut, which from my understanding is typically when musical groups' discoverability increases (from my understanding this is the rule of thumb for the greater musical community at large, not just in Korea). In 2017, EXO did a tour across Korea (EXO Planet #3: The Exo'rdium) that is their only concert album officially released, allowing international fans to have some experience with one of their concerts. Other than that, I'm not quite sure why 2017 was the year with the greatest number of new fans.
Also surprisingly there's quite a few fan that have been with them since Debut and that as a fandom, it is still growing.
It's a little chaotic, but for the most part, the proportionality stays the same. I am not going to go over this since I think the data speaks for itself at this point.
Quarter:
I've taken this even further by breaking this down into quarters as well. I felt that asking for fans to consistently rem what month they became fans was a bit overkill and would've been a bit unfair, especially to those who had been fans for awhile. Initially I tried to make this a pie graph but it had the same issue as the Country and Age sections: too much data to be able to easily read the graph.
So instead I opted for a bar graph. Different years are grouped together by color, with varying shades to distinguish by quarter. Based on the graph below, excluding Unknown, Debut and 2019 (because these were already broken down as far as I could take them, it appears that the 3rd quarter (July through September) for almost every year seems to be the highest. I believe this has to do with summer break (given the age of the majority of fans) when people have the time to truly explore new music.
While graphics are great, it's a little hard to tell the actual breakdown without numbers, I have also constructed a table to break it down even further. Once again percentages are based on the relative number in comparison to the total. The yellow cells indicate the highest quarter for that year. You'll notice that the percentages in the total quarters row do not necessarily add up to 100%. The reason for this is that I wasn't sure how to clearly include the percentages for Debut and Unknown to that row when they are already there in the last column. So just add the green and orange percentages to that final row and you'll find that they equal to 100%.
Looking at this graph, it further confirms my suspicions that the majority of fans found this group during the summer.
Ending Notes:
First, I'd like to address the fact that I did not include the individual members graphs section. Personally, I found it to be redundant and because making 36 graphs that already repeats information that was previously explained would have killed my wrist. HOWEVER, if you do enjoy that section, please let me know (you can contact me through my 'CONTACT ME' tab or through one of my social media pages) and I will go a head and add it back in.
Thank you to everyone who participated in this survey. I hope you all found this to be interesting. This was a learning experience (in case you couldn't tell) and as such, I would appreciate it of y'all would consider it as such. I am open to suggestions and criticisms on how to improve from here on out.
I might do this over again at a later point. I am not happy with it at all, and a lot of it has to do with my own mistakes and lack of data. I'm pretty sure I wasn't promoting it like I should've and let some stuff in my personal life really get to me. And I couldn't get enough data from regions beyond Europe and North America that I'm really not satisfied with how everything came out.
I am going to be trying to promote a new way, so that way my data is a lot fairer. I am going to be trying harder to reach fans in a Asia. I really want to get everyone's opinion and I don't think I've done fans in Asia (or anywhere really, but I really did badly with them because they're suppose to be one of the biggest groups of fans for this genre of music) any favors. So when I have a larger following on Twitter and when I've figured out how to contact fan accounts better, I might redo this along my other surveys.
Also, thank you to everyone who shared my survey. I've tagged all the people who I know shared my survey through Twitter and Tumblr. You're welcome to finish here, but please stick with me for a little longer to take a look at current open surveys, future projects, and how to share this on social media if you'd like to.
Cover photo provided by Allure.
Projects and Sharing:
For those who are interested, below are a list of projects and how to share them. When I publish results, I tag those who have shared it on that given social media platform. I believe in giving credit where it's due and if you shared it, you deserve to see the results and be acknowledged, you've contributed to me getting more information.
Where to follow me:
EXO Results:
Current Projects:
GOT7 Fan Demographics Survey *Closes May 12th, 2019*
BLACKPINK Fan Demographics Survey *Closes when I've reached my minimum of 500 entries*
Future Projects Survey *Open for the foreseeable future*
Future Projects:
Wanna have a say in what I'll be doing next? Check out this survey!
Please look forward to the following, in no particular order at this point:
TXT Pre Vs. Post Debut Survey Results
My Account of experiencing Ravi's Solo Tour in America
Dreamcatcher Fan Survey
Reevaluation of VIXX STARLIGHTS Survey
Monsta X Fan Survey
Red Velvet Fan Survey
NCT Fan Survey (Possibly, I'd have to figure out how to break it down first)
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