In particular, the differences between older and younger fans are fascinating.

January 23, 2023 by Jesse Weisz in Analysis with comments

This article is part of a series intended to provide insights into disc golf fandom. These insights will come through analyzing a rich data set produced by the first-ever Ultiworld/StatMando fandom survey. Here are the other articles in this series:

The Survey Itself And Who Took It
Which Pros Do We Root For and Against
How Fans See Disc Golf: Part 1
How Fans See Disc Golf: Part 2
How Gender Affects Who We Root For

This article will examine how our height, introversion/extroversion, and birth year affect who we root for. For the survey, we had the opportunity to ask some offbeat questions and did so because we were looking for possible strange connections. The height breakdown of respondents was as follows:

• The spike in respondents who are exactly 6 feet tall is likely due to how the question was structured (open form); many people likely rounded their height to 6 feet. Next time we offer the survey we will have participants choose their height from a drop-down menu.
• We received a few befuddled comments from respondents asking why we wanted to know their height. I thought that McBeth would be more popular with shorter people than taller people. At 5’8″ he is often on cards with much taller players who seem to benefit from longer levers. Would shorter players relate more to McBeth and be his biggest fans?

I created two groups: 1) Male respondents who were 5’8″ or shorter, and 2) fans who were 6′ 1″ or taller. I did not include female fans as they skew shorter which could influence the results. We had a reasonable sample size for both groups: 224 respondents in the short category and 328 in the tall category. I then looked at the difference between the fandom scores for these two segments for these seven MPO players:

• Nope! There does not seem to be a much, if any, fandom score boost that short players get from shorter fans.
• McBeth averaged 0.14 fandom score points higher from short respondents compared to the tall respondents. That is the biggest gap of these seven players, but it is not a meaningfully large enough gap to support my hypothesis.
• Wysocki and Lizotte are both over 6 feet tall and also had ever so slightly higher scores with shorter fans.
• McMahon received a 0.42 and Heimburg received a 0.23 fandom…