We've read (or at least discussed) Janice A. Radway's Reading the Romance and now you, too, can answer (some of) her questions. Not by going back to "Smithton" in a time machine, but by filling in a questionnaire created by Colleen Corliss, one of Eric's MA students:
Janice Radway is the author of Reading the Romance published in 1984. Radway conducted a survey based on 16 women from Smithton who are comprised mainly of housewives. In my survey I used most of the same questions Radway used in her own research. I added in a couple questions such as age, career, and family in order to support my thesis that romance readers are not uneducated housewives looking for a escape from their unhappy marriages by reading a love story about a heroine whose life they wish they had.If you'd like to answer Radway's questions and help Colleen with her research, you can find the questionnaire here. Colleen would also welcome comments about the survey, and you can leave those at the blog she's created for that purpose. Please note that once you've completed the survey you probably won't be able to go back and look at the questions, so please bear that in mind if you want to look at the questions while writing up your comment(s).
I have quite a bit of research to accomplish for my paper but I would greatly appreciate any feedback you could provide. I know that the questions look as though I am generalizing romance readers but the act was intentional for the survey portion. I will be conducting interviews of romance readers to get a better understand of why we read romance novels that is quite different from Janice Radway's hypothesis.
