ruffian

Thanks to everyone who participated in the research project my colleague and I conducted during the Philadelphia and Atlanta shows during 2005 regarding fan's perceptions and attitudes about the GA experience.

In case you have forgotten, we distributed surveys to almost 300 of you asking you about your demographic information, concert experiences, self-designated "fan status" (on a continuum from hardcore to casual fan), position in the line that day, and your attitudes about fairness (how long people should be able to leave the line and for what purposes, whether you can hold a spot for a friend). We provided some hypothetical scenarios to explore your reactions to line intrusion, or cutting in line.

We have (finally) finished analyzing and writing up the data for our first paper. We focused rather narrowly on the topic of line intrusion for the first project, and the paper is a rather technical analysis of the experimental data.

In a nutshell, we found that U2 fans are different than any other "queuing" population that has been studied by social scientists, in that they have a heightened degree of moral outrage about line cutting--and the more dedicated the fan, the more moral outrage they experience. U2 fans are also upset about cutting in line that occurs behind them. This is an unexpected result and has not been found in other literature. We explore some of the reasons this might occur.

We are working on second paper for the spring that will explore the GA experience more broadly: how norms of behavior emerge and are transmitted to members of the GA line, the role of online communities, and how fans devise concepts of fairness.

The research for our first project will be presented at the American Psychological Association meetings in San Francisco (pending acceptance--it has been submitted) in 2007, and will be submitted for review/publication in a social psychology journal at the beginning of the year.

For those who participated and asked to be notified of the results via email, we are in the process of doing that so you will receive something in the next day (as an MS Word attachment)

If you were not in the study but would like the results or were in the study but neglected to provide your email address, email us at U2Research@gmail.com and we'll send you a document outlining the experiments and the conclusions. Be warned, we made sure the article is tedious--in true academic fashion We are also interested in interviewing fans for our second paper, which will include some narrative data. If you are interested, email us. Likewise, if you ever helped organize or "ran" a GA line we would be especially interested in hearing your thoughts. Everything is completely confidential and we'd be sure to brief you on all that. Email if you'd like to participate next time around.

Thanks for your patience if you've been waiting to hear about these results.

Chizip

sounds interesting, if you need someone to interview for the next round, you know where to find me, keep up the good work!

4U2Play

Glad to see my tax money being put to good use.

Will the results of your project be published in Psychology Today or perhaps the New England Journal of Medicine? I hope that dude with all the U2 tatoos gets a few mentions.

ruffian

This project wasn't funded by your tax money. Both of our universities are private and they paid for the photocopies of the surveys. We covered our own travel expenses, etc.

The research will be submitted to the Journal of Applied Social Psychology and will be presented at the American Psychological Association Meetings in August, 2007. Psychology today is a rather "popular" forum that we don't think appropriate for this research, and the New England Journal of Medicine isn't quite appropriate...given that our research has no medical implications.

*Ally*

cool!! i remember participating in that survey in the philly GA line... looking forward to seeing what other insight you can glean from us U2 freaks!!

ruffian

and we're freaks with heightened senses of moral outrage, too!

daygloeyes2

ramblin rose

Did I miss something?

u2wedge

not really surprising... and this seems to go along the lines of normal human behavior.

I think a more interesting topic would be the reasons behind lining up days in advance, the reasons behind specific rules that are created for GA lines in different situations, etc. vs. line cutting. And if you're going to use line cutting as the topic, shouldn't you interview those who are line cutters just to round out the paper? I'd be interested to hear their reasons and I'm assuming that they might be just as 'die hard' as those who wait in line, but approach the GA line with a different attitude.

I mean, is there any fan group that *endorses* line cutting?

I'm not dissing your paper, it's just that I think 'discovering' that fans get upset when people cut in line isn't really ground breaking research, imho.

ruffian

Oh, I welcome any kinds of questions or discussion...especially given that your tone isn't mocking and rude, and that you make some interesting points.

The work is not groundbreaking in that people get upset about line-cutting. The results are simply unusual because in every other empirical study done about line intrusion, no one gives a crap if someone intrudes into the line behind them. So why is it that, in this sample of people, they care about what is going on behind them? Socially speaking, it's interesting and it's actually not normal human behavior.

I would argue (as we will in the second paper) that U2 fans in the GA tend to get upset about what goes on behind them because
1) chaos anywhere in the line can threaten their own security in the line, so it is ultimately old-fashioned self-interest, and

2) an unsually long queue lends itself to building social relationships. you speak to people in line behind you if you are going to leave for food or showers, people share food, stories about their favorite shows...so it is more a social system than other queues that have been studied.

In the second paper we are looking at how norms develop (so how people come up with rules for the GA, and how those rules are shared with others--and why people for the most part tend to follow them) and how people figure out what is "fair" in a given situation. We sort of know why people line up days in advance...to get a good spot on the floor. But the "secondary gains" are that they will visit with friends they have met on the tour and will participate in a shared experience that can sometimes be positive.

It would be fascinating to interview line cutters but I think they run too fast to fill out a survey

Feel free to PM if you want a copy of all the questions we explored on the survey, and thanks for your ideas.

STING2

As far as the demographic information, did you find out anything like the average age of the 300 people interviewed?

ruffian

From Philadelphia:

Participants
Participants were 283 adults (45% men) waiting in the GA line at two U2 concerts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in October 2005. The average age was 30 (SD 7.8, range 18-67). Participants were mostly white (90% white, 2% Asian/Asian-American, 2% Black/African-American, 3% Latino/Hispanic, and 3% other ethnicities) and educated (1% some high school, 8% completed high school, 23% some college, 49% completed college, and 19% advanced degrees). Participants reported being U2 fans for an average of 7 years (SD 7.2, range 0-26 years), having attended an average of 7 prior U2 concerts (SD 8.8, range 0-75) of which an average of 3 concerts entailed waiting in the GA line (SD 4.0, range 0-24). Fourteen percent said they were casual fans, 23% enthusiastic fans, 41% seriously dedicated fans, and 22% hardcore fans. On these two concert days the first fans in the GA line arrived at 9:30 PM and 10:30 PM the night before the concert the following evening.
Procedure

From Atlanta :

Participants
Participants were 206 U2 fans (54% men) waiting in the GA line at two U2 concerts in Atlanta, Georgia in November 2005. The average age was 30 (SD 7.3, range 18-57). Participants were mostly white (90% white, 2% Asian/Asian-American, 6% Latino/Hispanic, and 2% other ethnicities) and educated (6% completed high school, 20% some college, 49% completed college and 25% advanced degrees). Participants reported being U2 fans for an average of 14 years (SD 6.4, range 0-30), having attended an average of 6 prior U2 concerts (SD 7.9, range 0-50), of which an average of 3 concerts entailed waiting in the GA line (SD 5.4, range 0-36). Nine percent said they were casual fans, 26% enthusiastic fans, 51% seriously dedicated fans, and 12% hardcore fans.

the number here is over 300 because we had to throw out incomplete surveys or those completed by individuals under 18.

nurse chrissi

Good work!

It is slightly disturbing that even with the majority of those surveyed having a college degree or higher they still spent the night on the streets, sad really

I'm thinking that I'll use the next tour/GA line to work on my masters thesis for school entitled "The spread of community acquired illness in general admission"

U2Man

kellyahern

What were the other queuing populations that U2 fans were compared to? I'm curious as to what subjects the previous studies researched (ex. people lining up at theme parks, other concerts besides U2, shoppers on the day after Thanksgiving, etc. ).