December 14, 2022 by Jesse Weisz in Analysis with comments

The purpose of this article is to explain the rationale behind the questions we asked in the Ultiworld Disc Golf/StatMando Fandom Survey and the demographics of our survey respondents. This article is part of a series that will be released over the coming weeks.

Our survey, linked here, was broken down into several sections:

• Rating Pros: We selected 32 MPO and 21 FPO players and asked the survey respondents “on a ten-point scale, are you rooting against or for them?” The professionals included were chosen primarily based on their UDisc World Ranking. At the start of the survey, 19 of the biggest names in the sport were listed, with the remaining players in the final section of the survey. This split was made to increase the chances that respondents would fill out the non-player ranking sections. 909 (60.5%) respondents filled in both sections of players out of the 1503 total respondents.
• What makes you a fan?: In this section, we asked respondents to rank 10 attributes in terms of the most important factors for them when choosing (whether conscious or unconscious) who to root for and against.
• Involvement with disc golf: This section focused on disc golf-related questions, such as when respondents started playing the sport and how closely they follow the sport.
• Biographic/Demographic questions: This section focused on standard biographical information about the respondents. (More about that below).

The survey was distributed through the Twitter feeds of StatMando and UWDG, as well as other social media sources. We posted the survey to Reddit, several of the largest disc golf Facebook groups, and a few disc golf discord groups. In total, the survey was available for 34 days (8/29/2022 – 10/2/2022). Our hope was to collect data that broadly represents disc golf fans. Our survey provides us a look at one segment of the disc golf community – the one that is online, is willing to take a survey, and is engaged enough in the broader disc golf world that they would be on places like Ultiworld’s Discord, StatMando’s Twitter feed, and Reddit’s r/discgolf.

We will be releasing several articles in this series that cross-reference data from different survey questions to look for interesting patterns. All of the data below assumes our survey respondents were honest and did not fill out the survey multiple times. We discarded a few…