Primary Research.
2
Secondary Research
3
Findings and Conclusion
In this section I will be talking about the process of research that i have conducted myself through things such as interviews, observations and surveys; and how this research
1.1 Average Results of the observation that was undertaken
In graph 1.1 we can see that on average, the overall enjoyment had decreased by 1.07 on average after the episode has been spoiled however the only outlier is Fantasy wherein the average enjoyment increased after spoilers. After further inspection it has occurred that 50% of the participant’s enjoyment rating went down by at least 11.1 %(as seen in Participant 6) and that the average was merely a result of a skewed average due to other people rating fantasy episodes higher.
Plot fluency is a measure of how easily the participants could have understood the plot as they were watching, and in this observation Plot fluency increased by an average of 2.55 points where the highest increase was seen in action, 42.9%. Referring back to the survey, 44.8% of people surveyed who said they had liked action had also said they disliked the speed of the plot. This shows that plot fluency is low in the Action fans. This also shows us that sometimes aspects of series like plot fluency as relatively exclusive from the enjoyment of a series as although they had known more about the episode itself, many people claimed that their enjoyment was compromised.
When asked in the interviews why plot fluency isn’t important in order to enjoy a film, the interviewee had said that many of the reasons why they had enjoyed action movies was the suspense that had been the reason why they had kept on watching- as they do not know what is going to happen next. This contradicts Dr Christenfields study wherein he said that “some familiarity with a work of art enables you to enjoy it more”, a likely reason is that this depends on what peoples meaning of enjoyment means and the different aspects they like about TV series. Whilst Overall enjoyment decreased, Involvement also decreased by an average of 1.12 in every single category. The hardest hit was taken in the Comedy Category wherein the involvement decreased by 23.8%. When asked in the survey, a significant amount of people said that “they would not enjoy watching episodes after receiving spoilers”.
This will be discussed in my next set of graphs obtained from the surveys where I will analyse the effect of spoilers on the participants based on what genre they said they are enjoying. From the series of participants, the one that was seen to have the most positive improvement in all aspects was participant 4, where in every category the inclusion of spoilers had made watching the TV episode more enjoyable, involving and fluent, except for the involvement in comedy. An extract from T.A. Daniel also says that “research shows that these findings may be driven by an interaction of individual differences, such as need for cognition, rather than a broad spoiling effect”.
This extract and the variance in participant data further supports my reasoning that different people like different things. When compared to the results of K. Johnson, B. and E. Rosenbaum, J. (2019), it can be seen that many of the results mimiced theirs whereing the Transport(Involvement) and Enjoyment had decreased on average however the Fluency(Plot Fluency) had increased after recieving spoilers.
1.2 Participant 4's results of the observation that was undertaken
1.3 (Left) and 1.4(Right), displaying the results from two most opposing genres from the six options in the survey
In the graphs above, from 1.3 to 1.4, we can see that the change in overall effect in participants seen in the survey varies. The graphs have been placed to compare the sensitivity to spoilers in different genres.
The genre that is most affected by spoilers was “Horror” which usually uses suspense to entice and play with the involvement of viewers in order to create an “enjoyable”. A possible reason for this would be that, as found in Weisenbergers Study, stories that had been "spoiled" were rated as “less moving, less thought provoking, and less successful at drawing the reader into a narrative world and providing an immersive experience”.
Although some Genres such as Romance could be independent of the effects of spoilers due there being a lack of suspense and mostly relying on emotion and visual appeal and characters (as only 78% of people surveyed said they liked the visual appeal and characters more), Genres like Horror where 67.3% people said that they liked the “Plot/storyline” meant that once the plot was spoiled for them the show became less enjoyable.
However when asked if this would affect them to the point that they wouldn’t watch the episode, 57.1% of people said that they would still watch the episode. This was expected as they must keep up with the story in order to make out the previous events and keep up with the plot. A large amount of people from action also claimed that spoilers would affect their enjoyment, and from this set of people 77.4% had said that their least liked aspect of action TV shows was the speed of the plot.
When asked to further explain why the speed of the plot was their least liked aspect some had said that is was because they “didn’t like when the story was too slow, as it would make the show predictable”. As expected and contrary to the observation the Comedy survey participants had said that they would not be affected by spoilers as much. The difference may be due to this graph being limited to people who only like comedy however the observation was a mix of people who had liked and disliked comedy; leading to possibly ambiguous results for comedy.
From this set of graphs we can make out two types of people in this study, people who are attached to the plot because they don’t know what is going to happen and people who are watching the show to affirm their own “predictions”. This moves me onto the interview results where I will discuss the implications of these two groups of people.
As a preface, in my interviews I asked a series of questions in order to get the same the answers as from the survey however I used this opportunity to find the reasons that they had said what they had said. I used some questions in order to open the interviewee up to more thinking and make them comfortable, therefore the redundancy of questions is not accidental or due to a lack of proofreading on my part but entirely intentional and strategic.
Continuing with the statement said in my previous there are two groups of people where one enjoys not knowing or predicting what is going to happen and the other enjoys reaffirming what they can make out. In my interviews I had seen that people such as Burak, Ahmed and Obada had said that spoilers did “not really” affect the enjoyment of them watching the episode. When asked why they didn’t really become affected by the spoilers they had said that it was because “the show could not really be spoiled”, and that if they had received spoilers they would “watch the episode anyways” because “they had not seen it for themselves”.
Another thing that was interesting to note is that all of these people claimed that the shows they had watched were semi-predictable such as, in Buraks words, “Its predictable but at the same time unpredictable”. This directly contrasts all the other people who had said that they don’t like predictability in other interviews. This was expected however as a majority 58.8% of the Comedy survey participants had said that they disliked other aspects other than Predictability. On the flip side, the people who are emotionally attached to the plot had said they had mostly liked the suspense of not knowing what was to come next; and that spoilers would be detrimental to that. In rare cases there are people such as Ali, where he had said he had completely dropped an entire show “The good place” as it had become “spoiled” due to predictability and other factors such as a lack of time. Although that may possibly be a mixture of factors instead of purely predictability but the fact that it had played a large role in not watching even one episode the show per month implies that is was majorly predictability.
To test if some of the people who claimed to be averse to spoilers were truly so I had asked a follow up question where I had asked if they would have “pointers” instead of spoilers(even though they are the same thing); some of the interviewees such as Muntazar said he would like to have pointers some times, implying that spoilers can coexist with people who like suspense. In a way from my perspective the use of predicting may actually be a pointer in itself that allows people to watch the episode and make more sense of it; this can be justified because all people who claimed to predict shows said that they wouldn’t mind spoilers except for Bandar.