Results are presented in a drop-down menu for easy browsing, and also in a downloadable PDF in the form of a Powerpoint presentation.

All results on the site are also available in the PDF, which can be downloaded here: Results2009.

If you would like to discuss the results, please go to the Discussion page to join or start a comment thread. We have centralized all comments on the site on the Discussion page in order to make it easier to find active discussions.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do percentages in the charts sum to more than 100%?

Many bar charts sum to more than 100% because the survey contained some questions that asked respondents to “choose all that apply.” Each bar represents the percentage of all respondents who chose that particular option. Since respondents could choose more than one option, the percentages of all the bars add to more than 100%.

You may notice that for “forced choice” questions, where respondents could only choose one answer, we usually present the data in a pie chart where each section of the pie represents the portion of total respondents who chose that option. In both bar charts and pie charts, we always indicate the number of people who responded to each question, represented in shorthand as (N=).

Why do you give the median instead of the average for some questions? What is the mode, and why is it relevant?

Averages, medians, and modes are all “measures of central tendency” in statistics. Because averages can be pulled up or down by extreme values in a data set, the median, or middle value, is usually a better measure of the value for a typical respondent. The mode is the most common value in a dataset, and is usually useful because it is the only measure of central tendency for non-numeric data. Sometimes the mode can give a different perspective on the data, especially when there might be factors that influence that particular choice. For example, in the age data, the median age of respondents is 53, but the most common age listed– the mode– is much higher, at 62. These respondents were 22 in 1969, supporting findings in Caroline Lee’s qualitative fieldwork, in which D&D practitioners often cited experiences in the 1960s as influential on their interest in D&D and their current practice.

I am having trouble reading the captions on some of the charts because the font is tiny or hard to read.

Because of the maximum width for images on the website, some images of charts with multiple options don’t reproduce well on the web. Please contact Caroline Lee for larger, higher-resolution images.

What happened to the information in the “fill in the blank” questions and the “Other: please specify” options?

We are still working on processing and analyzing the great qualitative data we received. Stay tuned for updates to the site as we post new results and analysis.

Have more questions that aren’t answered here? Please contact the researchers or post a question on our Discussion page.