Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
The UC San Diego Department of Psychology is too highly ranked for their faculty not to be getting salaries in the upper level for their profession. I'm, of course, not saying this makes it a good study, and only mention it because you brought up the money angle 
The sample size of 819 seems to me impressively high.
If you think about what kind of undergraduates attend UC San Diego (well above average, but not the absolute top), and the fact that they preferred genre over literary works, it seems to me a reasonable middle of the road sample for the purpose.
What would it take to impress you? |
I took a "study" class at University of Washington and it's quite interesting when you sample students in particular. Students are a rather isolated bunch (meaning they are at a point in life where they are all experiencing largely the same environment or at least a large number of similarities. They are often close in age and often have similar discretionary incomes when compared to the population at large.) In other words, a sample of students, (if it was students and in the class I took it was ALWAYS students--free, readily accessible, etc) you actually do not get a good cross section of anything OTHER than students. Students interacting with other students can often mean they begin to share even more similarities (hobbies, study times, food choices, movie choices, etc). Their circle of influence is more confined than that of an overall population.
So this class I took made mention of how doing a study in any confined environment actually results in almost a herd mentality. I don't know that the study was done using only students, but a more interesting (and impressive) study would be to use avid readers as the subjects. So you would "cull the herd" by only using responses from those who read 1 book per month or more (or whatever criteria you decide defines a reader). This would gather from a larger cross-section of people who may only share reading as a primary hobby.
But really to me...I don't see a lot of purpose to the study as far as enriching anyone's life. I suppose that as an author, I could glean some valuable information: If I write stories with few surprises and I rinse and repeat just changing characters, I will be madly successful...
Hmm. Well, it is food for thought. But I STILL hope they didn't get paid a lot...