Study results

Scott of Hyperborea · Post by **Scott of Hyperborea** » Sat Jun 05, 2004 8:20 pm

The study was completed by forty people, of whom 7 were Baracaoan, 5 Shirerithian, 5 Babkhan, 3 Feianovan, 2 Atteran, 2 Arminian, 1 Hanoverian, 8 from another nation not listed, and 2 from no nation at all. 
 
Among the most surprising results of this study was that many micronationalists are too stupid to follow simple directions. Although the form clearly said not to give a rating for your own nation, there were people who put down a nation for their primary nationality and then proceeded to give that nation a five. Do you really think I wouldn't catch you? There were also cases of people giving "None" for their micronation and then saying they had two or three citizenships, or, alternately, someone putting down a home micronation and then denying they had any citizenships at all. In cases where people blatantly contradicted themselves, I did not count the information. 
 
Another thing I learned from this study is that Excel is, in many ways, a piece of worthless accursed lemur excrement. I was unable to do some of the analyses or graphs that I was interested in because of program-imposed limitations. If I have time, I may transfer the data to SPSS later and see if that will help. 
 
In terms of actual data, there were not many questions that people came to a clear consensus on, the most generally agreed point being that an impressive 62.5% of respondents did not plan to live micronationalism until their "cold dead fingers were pried from the computer", with about half of the other 37.5% agreeing that they would be in it for a long time to come. Only 17.5% of people thought there was a good chance that they would get out of micronationalism by the end of the year. 
 
Of the five micronations for which information is available, Babkha has the most positive image abroad (mean = 4.04/5, median = 4/5). Baracao (mean = 3.44, median = 3) and Shireroth (mean = 3.29, median = 3.5) are close behind, while Attera (mean = 3.06, median = 3) and Arminy (mean = 2.33, median = 2.5) follow. Baracao and Babkha were both helped by extremely positive feelings among citizens toward one another. 
 
Those worried about the trend of too much dual citizenship in micronations can take heart - both the median and the mode number of citizenships were just 1, with the mean being just 1.75. However, there was significant variation here, with a standard deviation of about 1.2 from that mean - doubtless helped by a few respondents' report of four citizenships, with the maximum being a Feianovan who reported the highest category, six or more. 
 
Most of you (50%) thought that dual citizenship should not be banned outright, but did believe that there should be legal limits on it. Only 2.5% of you believed that dual citizenship was absolutely unacceptable, and a full 30% couldn't see anything wrong with it. The remainder (17.5%) thought that it was a problem but should not be restricted by governments. 
 
Possibly more worrying is that 37.5% of respondents not only had no objection to micronational war but admitted that they enjoyed it. 20% believed it was wrong under all circumstances, while the remaining 42.5% were willing to accept it under some circumstances but would condemn it under others. 
 
Micronationalists were also very accepting of simulations and, to a lesser degree, fantasy. Only 2.5% thought simulations did not belong in micronations at all, and only 20% had this opinion about fantasy. In contrast, 27.5% and 5%, respectively, thought simulations and fantasy were vital parts of the micronational experience. A majority of micronationalists thought that simulations were a good thing within reasonable limits, and that fantasy was all right although they didn't personally want it in their country. Some people (and the Foundation doesn't blame them, they were probably very tired when filling out the form) expressed the opinion that, while fantasy was great, they were opposed to simulation; one wonders exactly how they intend to get that fantasy without simulated elements. 
 
People's reasons for being in micronations were as varied as their micronations were, and there was no clear winner. The most common response, by a hair, was "to simulate the workings of a real country", but all others were pretty close, with the exception of founding a real landed country, which only 7.5% of people wanted to do. 
 
A plurality of those surveyed (42.5%) were somewhat open about their micronational hobby, although significant minorities kept it totally secret (27.5%), and trumpeted it to the world (12.5%). 
 
A small majority (52.5%) included religion as a part of their micronational experience; of these, 12.5% were part of micronational adaptations of real world religions and the other 40% part of native micronational religions. 
 
Amazingly, 65% of those surveyed had founded a micronation at some point in their career. 
 
All of those founders, however, must not have been doing much recruiting - the most common method by which people learned of micronationalism was just by surfing the web - 52.5% of us found micronationalism that way, while only 35% were referred by friends, real life or online. The remainder were referred by a book or an article they saw in a magazine, with the exception of an Arminian who didn't fall into any of those categories. 
 
Whatever recruiting methods we're using, they're not working. The average micronationalist has been in the hobby for a long time. (mean = 2.79 years, median = 2.5 years, mode = 4 years; the process I used to get the mean was kinda sketchy so I'd go with one of the others) This is a considerable fraction of zir life, for, as we probably already guessed, our average community member is in zir late teens or early twenties (mean age = 21.775, median = 19, mode = 18; this mean is also a little messed up). 
 
What conclusions can we draw from this? The conclusion I draw is that we should try and increase micronationalism's presence on the web and the major search engines if we want to recruit people, and that we really do need to recruit young blood. It also seems that micronationalism is becoming less serious than it has been in the past, but that most people don't have a problem with that so it's not too big of a problem. Finally, and most importantly, people need to learn to fill out forms correctly and in a self-consistent manner. 
 
If you want to see the raw data, you can download an Excel spreadsheet with all the information from http://www.geocities.com/newaudentior/f ... ostats.xls . It's a little hard to understand - talk to me if you're having trouble, but basically I just numbered the choices from top to bottom (top is one, except on the citizenships question where it's zero) and recorded the number, except on the founder question, where 0 means no and 1 means yes. I have not recorded two questions (how many boards people visit and what areas they participate in) because I'd have to work out a new system for that, not that it would be too hard, but that's a job for another day, possibly tomorrow; if you want to do that tell you and I'll send you the info) If you do any analyses of that data and get interesting results, please post them. 
 
Thank you to everyone who participated!

Edited by: <A HREF=http://p074.ezboard.com/bmicronationaln ... orea>Scott of Hyperborea</A>  <IMG HEIGHT=10 WIDTH=10 SRC="http://squid314.homestead.com/files/littleicon.jpg" BORDER=0> at: 6/6/04 21:48

Unknown · Post by **Unknown** » Mon Jun 13, 2005 4:19 pm

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Study results

Study results

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