A (Very) Brief (Non-scientific) Study in Perceptions of Romance Novels

A few months ago, I asked y'all to answer a survey for me. It was a project for a grad school class I was taking. I meant to share the results with you, but I never got around to it until now. Sorry! Read on if you're curious.

For my individual project, I decided to use my social media networks to find out a little bit about people's varying perceptions of romance novels. I am a long-time reader of popular fiction, including romance novels. And romance novels have long gotten a bad rap -- it's actually hard for some people to admit that they like to read them because so many people look down on them as "garbage." I'll totally admit that there are a lot of romance novels that are silly and badly written, and a small step up from porn in book format. But, in my opinion, there are lots of romance novels that are beautifully written, with great stories, complex characters, and interesting plots. A romance novel is simply a story that is about love, which ends happily. What's not to like?

But getting you all to understand my love of romance novels is not what this project is about. I thought it would be interesting to somehow capture a visual representation of people's perceptions of romance novels -- and somehow to compare the perception of people who actually read romance novels to the general population.

Methodology
So, this study was not at all scientific. But there was a method to my madness. I created two surveys using Google forms. They both asked the same question: What is the first word that comes to your mind when you think of romance novels? I posted the link to one of the surveys to my facebook page, asking people to take the survey and then post the link to their facebook walls to spread it to more people. These participants were meant to represent the "general population." Now, granted, this is not at all a valid sample of the general population -- they are all people I know, or people who know someone I know. But it is a fairly mixed group of people. The second survey I posted to my book blog. This is a blog that I've kept for the last five years or so, which is entirely devoted to my book reviews of popular fiction -- and the vast majority are romance novels. Nearly all the people who visit the blog are people who read romance novels. I asked this readership to take the survey, then post the survey to their own romance book blog. This group was meant to represent romance readers -- people who frequently actually read romance novels.

The number of participants for each survey was pretty good. I was hoping to have at least 100 people answer each survey. My facebook survey was slightly disappointing, since I only got 79 people to answer. My romance reader population was a problem at first, since not that many people read my blog. However, I sent an email to the writers of one of the most popular romance blogs in the blogosphere (Smart Bitches, Trashy Books), and they were nice enough to tweet the plea for people to take my survey (AWESOME!). I soon had almost 200 responses to that survey.

I then took the one-word answers of each survey and plugged it into Wordle. This produced a word cloud that shows the most common answers in large font, with less popular answers in increasingly smaller fonts. It provides an immediate visual representation of people's perceptions of romance novels.

Results
Here is the Wordle for the general population:

And here is the Wordle for the romance-reading population:

[You can click on the photos to view larger.]

You can see that there is a huge difference between these two populations' perceptions of romance novels. The general population thinks romance novels are all about sex, that they are trashy and cheesy. For romance readers, by far the most popular answer was "love," followed by happy and fun.

I loved the way this project allowed me to use my social networks to tap into large populations of people almost immediately. I posted the surveys and just sat back and watched as my data streamed in. I was also able to target a particular kind of participant by using the romance-reader blogosphere that I've become a part of. The power of Web 2.0!

Kristan Higgins glom

Angie posted a few weeks ago about Kristan Higgins, saying that she was a great writer for Jennifer Crusie fans. Of course, I am a huge Jennifer Crusie fan, so I decided to check Higgins out. So glad I did! I went on a glom and read all 7 of her books. And my library didn't have any of them, so I bought them all for my Kindle! This is quite a compliment to Higgins, as I am quite cheap.

I'm not sure exactly how to classify Higgins' books -- they're contemporary romances, but they also feel a bit womens-fiction-y, in that they focus quite a lot on the heroine's family and personal growth/issues. And they're all very funny. I was immediately sucked into all of them -- I thought all the main characters (with just a couple exceptions) were really great and interesting and likeable. They're all set in New England, most of them in idyllic small towns.

They're the kind of book I start reading and hours later I'm still reading and don't want to stop.

My favorites were Catch of the Day (the heroine is an identical twin!) and All I Ever Wanted. And she has a new one coming out on 10/25 -- will probably have to buy that one too. :)