Fairy Tale Research: How Well Do You Know the Stories?
- noorka
- Nov 10, 2015
- 2 min read
I was very interested in assessing the knowledge of fairy tales in the general population. I created a survey of 12 common tales and picked the aspect of the story that had the most variation. I purposely didn’t give much direction on what source of knowledge to draw upon so I could see the automatic association of different groups.
There were three hypotheses for the research.
Younger people (10-30 years old) would draw their knowledge from pop culture such as Disney rather than the original tales.
Different localities would have different knowledge of more nebulous and culturally diverse tales. Eg. Cinderella, the slipper is glass in the French tale, but gold in the German version.
Females would do better than males in their knowledge of fairy tales, since these stories are more impressed upon females when they are young.
I created a far more in depth analysis of all the data as well as an answer key that can be read at you leisure. I strongly recommend read it as it will make the data a lot easier to understand since I am just going to discuss the outcomes for each of the hypotheses.
One very important thing to note is that the data is not statistically sound. There were not enough responses from different locals, different age groups, or different sexes to make any sort of solid conclusion. And as with all statistical data that does not come from experimentation, correlation does not imply causation. Just because you can see a connection does not mean that it is the cause for that phenomenon.
Hypothesis One
This age group, 10-30 year olds, was the largest portion of responses. Only 7 of the 57 (12.28%) responses fell outside of this range. As you can see in the analysis of each question most fairy tales that had common Disney versions had that as the major answer.
The more interesting aspect of this is that the older age brackets had the highest scores. This doesn’t tell us much since in some circumstances there were only one or two responses representing an age bracket.
Hypothesis Two
Considering that only 2 of the 57 responses were from places outside of the United States there is such insufficient data to make any sort of claim, reliable or no.
Hypothesis Three
This is the one hypothesis that almost has enough data to be statistically significant. ⅔ of the responses identified as female, ⅓ identified as male, and 0 identified as other. The females had an average score of 26.83% while the males had an average score of 25.93%. These scores are relatively close and with better data could potentially disprove the hypothesis.
I would like to thank everyone who participated in the survey. Hopefully in the future there will be more responses to make the fuller.
Comments