This blog post represents an initial reporting on the results of first wave of studies done for this project:

This initial report was given at the Fan Studies Network – North America 2023 conference; the poster for which can be found at: https://prezi.com/p/edit/szivhpzzf9b_/

You can follow this blog or our research group’s Twitter account for more updates: https://twitter.com/PoliReliFandom

First, a review of what is meant by understanding fandom as an attitude. An fandom-as-attitude is a combination of affectations and perspectives regarding a specific object, whether that object is concrete or abstract. As an attitude, a person’s fandom should overlap with their other perspectives, beliefs, and values that reflect and represent their personal stance within specific ideological frames. These beliefs held before they encountered the fan object should then inform, influence, and impact the person’s decoding and recoding of the object in relation to the ideological encoding present in the object. Thus, preexisting political and religious beliefs should inform the reception of and reaction to the object.

Decoding, or sense-making, is the internal behaviors of a fandom, which include but are not limited to opinions, interpretations, desires, feelings, needs, attentions, intentions, and so forth. Recoding, or fan activities, exist as the external behaviors of a fandom, which include everything from repeatedly returning to community engagement to consumption and collection to roleplay.

Subsequent fandom attitudes and behaviors may result in changes to preexistent political and religious attitudes and behaviors, from reinforcing to adapting to altering. Thus, fandom attitudes provide possible pathways for negotiating ideological frames, resulting in possible indoctrination into specific ideological frames and their related behaviors.

One reason to explore these overlaps is to understand and educate people on how intertwined our everyday fandom pursuits are with these larger — but perhaps seen less as — daily activities around politics and religion. People need to remember that politics, religion, and fandom do not just exist as external structures people engage with; instead, people also manifest and reinforce those structures through their own attitudes and agency, even on the level of their daily lives.

This current study begins to address this theoretical pathway for indoctrination or socialization by mapping the attitudinal overlaps between political, religious, and fandom beliefs and behaviors. The study included online questionnaires and self-interviews. The focus is on presenting quantitative results with statistical analysis to identify attitudinal overlaps. The initial overlaps are discussed in the FSNNA poster above. These overlaps were found by running correlations between the Likert items used to measure the three types of attitudes. All these correlations, including those not reported, can be found here.

While we may be seeking a second round of sampling, the current sample consists of 272 questionnaires and 28 self-interviews. For the questionnaires, the sample can be described thusly:

• Political affiliation: 39% Democrats, 24% Socialists, 13% Republicans, and 12% Libertarians
• QAnon supporters: 4% yes, 7% maybe, 6% I don’t know, and 83% no
• Religious affiliation: 26% atheists, 22% Catholic, 20.5% agnostic, 13% Protestant, and 8% Humanist
• Age groups: 34% 35-44 year old, 28% 25-34 year old, and 11% 45-54 year old

Thus, one reason for a second round of sampling would be to increase the number of conservatives in the sample. The current correlational analyses indicate significant attitudinal overlaps that require further exploration with additional sampling.

Conservative political and religious beliefs related to conservative perspectives in fandoms; yet, the more conservative the fan, the less they appear to be invested in and perceive as important the fandom. Still, conservative attitudes are still related to increased fan activities, including fan activism.

Further analysis will be conducted to illustrate the impact and influence pathways between attitudes and behaviors. Factor analyses can potentially strengthen and clarify the attitudinal overlaps seen in the correlations, and regressions and SEMs could illuminate pathways. ANOVAS and ANCOVAs could explore pockets of attitudes based on fandoms and demographics.

Additionally, the analysis of the self-interviews will explore how fans make sense of the overlaps among politics, religions, and fandoms.