Our Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings survey uncovered 3 very interesting trends:
- Women preferred Harry Potter 2 to 1, while men preferred Lord of the Rings 2 to 1.
- People below the median age of 34 tend to prefer Harry Potter, while Lord of the Rings fans had a more even age distribution.
- Older readers are more likely to differentiate between aspects of the series, while younger readers tend to like all or nothing from either series.
It is hard to draw any great conclusions from this, but the broad age appeal of the Lord of the Rings means it might have a greater effect on literature in the long run, while Harry Potter will be more of a fad. It would be interesting to repeat this survey every 5-10 years and see if Harry Potter fans retain their preference. The fact that the last Harry Potter movie came out at the same time we are giving this survey may have also affected the results. Lord of the Rings still had a strong showing even though the last movie release was 6 years ago.
Our other assignment was to look for sources of statistical information on the internet. The best site I found was fedstats.gov. This site contains an index to all other federal sites that publish statistics, and has several search tools embedded in it.
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