November 14, 2023 by Orion Burt in News with 0 comments
The purpose of this article is to explain the rationale behind the questions we asked in the Ultiworld Disc Golf/StatMando Fandom Survey and the demographics of our survey respondents. This article is part of a series that will be released throughout the offseason.
11. Tufts EWO
Our survey, linked here, was broken down into several sections:
- Rating Pros: We selected 37 MPO and 20 FPO players and asked the survey respondents, on a ten-point scale, are you rooting against or for them? The professionals included were chosen primarily based on their UDisc World Ranking or place on the DGPT Tour Points Leaderboard. At the start of the survey, 16 of the biggest names in the sport were listed, with the remaining players in the final section of the survey. This split was made to increase the chances that respondents would fill out the non-player ranking sections. 1690 (55.6%) respondents filled in both sections of players out of the 3040 total respondents.
- Player Questions: In this section, we asked respondents to choose their favorite players as well as guess who will win the most Majors in the next five years.
- Assorted Disc Golf Questions: This section focused on disc golf-related questions, such as when respondents started following the sport, how often they play, and which are their favorite courses on tour and how closely they follow the sport.
- Disc Golf Media: This section focused on media questions. Respondents rated commentators from DGN and Jomez on a 0-10 scale, told us how closely they follow FPO and MPO, and whether they prefer Live or Post.
- Discs and Manufacturers: This section focused on disc related questions. Respondents rated several manufacturers on a 0-10 scale, and answered questions such as how many discs they have bought in the last 12 months.
- Biographic/Demographic questions: This section focused on standard biographical information about the respondents. (More about that below).
The survey was initially distributed through the Twitter feeds of StatMando and UWDG, and then picked up by other media sources. Here is a graph of the sources of our respondents:
Where did you find out about this survey?
In total, the survey was available for 56 days (8/17/2023 – 10/12/2023). Our hope was to collect data that broadly represents disc golf fans. Our survey provides us a look at one segment of the disc golf community – the one that is online, is willing to take a survey, and follows one of the media sources that shared a link to the survey.
We will be releasing several articles in this series that cross-reference data from different survey questions to look for interesting patterns. All of the data below assumes our survey respondents were honest and did not fill out the survey multiple times. We discarded a few surveys that were, either duplicates, blank, or filled out as a joke.
Below is a breakdown of the demographics of the 3040 survey respondents. Note that some respondents skipped questions, so we rarely have 3040 responses to a given question.
Birth Year of Survey Respondents
54.8% of our survey respondents were millennials, which is 27 to 42 years old in 2023. I will be referencing the 2022 PDGA Year Demographics Report to evaluate whether the survey respondents represented a balanced sample of disc golfers. PDGA membership might skew from the actual demographics of fandom as a whole. Although the PDGA does not differentiate age demographics by generation, our survey respondent demographics look similar as they report 51.6% of PDGA members are between the ages of 25 and 39.
Number of Survey Respondents by Gender
For our survey, 95.0% of respondents were male, 4.8% were female, and 0.2% were non-binary. According to the PDGA, 92.6% of their members are male and 7.4% of their members are female.
Number of Survey Respondents by Race
The PDGA Report does not include the racial demographics of the PDGA’s membership.
Number of Survey Respondents in each US State
83.4% of respondents live in the United States. The map presented above shows the number of respondents per state. The top four most represented states among the fandom survey respondents matched the top four states in terms of the number of PDGA members.
10.8% of respondents live in Europe. Europeans make up 15% of PDGA members, so our survey had an under-sampling of Europeans. Here are the overall numbers:
[table “261” not found /]What is the highest level of education you completed?
The survey included the question “What is the highest level of education you completed?” The data is a bit muddled as not all respondents fit into the multiple-choice selections we provided. We had to interpret some of the custom answers and sort them into a category, some of which were not a choice on the survey. A completed bachelor’s degree is by far the most common answer, making up 42.8% of the data set. 19.5% of respondents had a master’s or doctorate. Combined, that suggests 62.3% percent of respondents have a bachelor’s or higher. To put this number in context, roughly 37.7% of Americans have achieved a bachelor’s degree or higher. For context, the percentage for Finns is 35.9%. For both Swedes and Norwegians, it is 41.1%.
Number of Survey Respondents by Politics
To make the political question applicable to non-Americans, we used the terms Right and Left wing. Last year we had so many people “write-in” that they were libertarians, we decided to offer it as an option in the survey. Most libertarians in the US vote Republican. Overall our data is skewed toward the left, but nearly as much as last year. Nevertheless, the number of respondents reflects a reasonable sample size to evaluate patterns across the political spectrum.
How religious would you describe yourself on a scale of 1 to 10?
We asked participants to describe how religious they are on a ten-point scale. Keep in mind this question is pretty binary for many people, which is probably why 0 was the choice of 40.1% of respondents. About 31.2% of respondents entered a 6 or above.
Number of Survey Respondents by Household Income
To put our household income distribution in context, in 2022, 34.4% of American households had a $100,000+ income. Unfortunately, we did not set our income brackets to match the common income brackets used by the census, so it is tough to make the data line-up exactly, but 42.7% of our respondents have a household income of $110,000+.
Please see the full series of articles by following these links:
The Survey Itself & Who Took It
Which Pros Do We Root For and Against
How Fans Feel about Discs and Manufacturers: Coming This Offseason
How Fans Feel about Media and Commentators: Coming This Offseason
More Findings From The Fandom Survey: Coming This Offseason
