Who Are Monbebe: The Results Are In!

Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Monsta X or Starship Entertainment. All thoughts are my own and are based on my observations and the results I received from this survey.

It’s finally that time! The results of the survey are finally in and over the next few days I’m going to be posting those results and my thoughts on them! I’m going to be posting a total of 5 analyses and this is the first one! Unfortunately, this one is going to be a little dull because it’s a lot of informational stuff that I want to make people aware of so they know how the survey was conducted. I’m also going to be going over some biases/errors in this post so that they’re in everyone’s mind as the other posts come out.

Creation & Distribution:

As I mentioned in an earlier post before posting this final version of the survey I had already posted a version which had gotten a total of 12 responses in the day or so that it was up. When the thought of doing this seriously and getting a lot of results and being able to delve into them and find out a lot of information about the Monsta X fandom hit me, is when I decided to stop responses on my first draft and to edit it to what it now is. This is also when I decided to try and find someone to help me translate the questions into Korean. Again, as I mentioned before I felt it was only fair to also have the questions in Korean because Monsta X are from South Korea so in my mind it made a lot of sense.

After editing a few questions and adding a couple I reopened the survey and posted it on my own personal Twitter and Tumblr. I then became that annoying person who was crazily messaging people on Tumblr asking them if they’d be interested in taking or sharing the survey, or even doing both! I messaged over 150 people… I know. While messaging people on Tumblr someone mentioned the Monbebe Amino fanpage - which I had no idea existed - and that I should also share it there, so that’s exactly what I did. I created an account, talked to two of the admins of that fanpage and made a blog post about it on Amino. Again, after talking to the Twitter moderator in the Monbebe Amino she mentioned sharing it on Twitter, which I had done on my personal but realised wasn’t working that effectively. So this is when I decided to make the mxsurvey account. The Monbebe Amino Twitter admin helped me with retweeting it (Thank you!). I didn’t want to become annoying on Twitter with messaging people but in the end that’s what I did. I messaged about 40 people and a lot of them shared it which I appreciated!

I tried creating an Instagram to share it but honestly had no idea how to even go about it so that was a total fail. I also shared it on the MX VLIVE fan postings page, as well as the MX CHANNEL+ fanpage. I also shared it with almost every Monsta X/Monbebe fanpage I could find on Facebook. I honestly thought Facebook was going to be the gold mine for responses but as it turns out Twitter, and probably the Amino page were the most helpful. I posted about it in the Monbebe Talk Tok a couple of times as well but my Korean is still at a low level so I don’t think posting it there was that effective either.

In the end I ended up leaving the survey up for a little over a month and accumulated 1,314 responses which I am more than happy with. I didn’t expect so many but am so thankful to everyone who took the time to take and share the survey!

Biases/Errors:

There are a few questions that I noticed had some issues so I’m going to address those a little in depth here. Before I get into those question though there is one major bias that I would like to point out and that is going to be language. While many of the people who took this survey speak English (which you will see later) there is a chance that some people may have wanted to take the survey but couldn’t because they don’t understand either English or Korean. While I obviously can’t make the survey available in every language there is, I do wish I also had it translated into at least Japanese because of Monsta X’s presence in Japan.

What Gender do you identify as?

It was brought to my attention multiple times that including the options Transgender Male and Transgender Female could be isolating since they’re the same as Male and Female. I was told that if I wanted to have these options then I should have added Cis-Male/Cis-Female as an option instead of Male/Female. I didn’t have any intention of harm when I wrote out the answer options, I actually thought I was doing a good thing but we all learn! So I’ll now know this for future surveys I may conduct. In regards to this when I post the final numbers there is only going to be: Male, Female, Non-binary, Other, and Prefer Not to Say.

What is your native language?

This one wasn’t so bad, I just wanted to address the fact that when I copied all the answers into the drop down list I thought I was viewing a complete list but as it turns out I wasn’t. So if any of the options were incorrect or your native language wasn’t on the list I apologize.

What is your ethnicity?

When I wrote this question and was looking up how the answer options are usually written I knew that at some point it was going to give me problems. At some point in the middle of the survey someone messaged me on Twitter and wasn’t sure what to put for that question so I went in and added an Other option giving that person and everyone who took the survey afterwards the option to write in there in answer. Now, obviously this isn’t fair to the people who took it before that person sent me their question, but that’s why this question in on this list. Many of the written in answers were Mixed, Biracial, Arab, or even a few people who simply stated they didn’t know. So in the end I think if I do future surveys I will add these options or some variation of these options.

Who is your bias?

This one, again, isn’t a major issue but was a question I got a lot of comments on as to why I didn’t add an ‘All’ option. I didn’t add an ‘All’ or ‘Prefer Not to Say’ option on this question because I wanted solid answers. I feel like if I had those options then those would be greater than the actual votes on each member. I think to amend for this I could have made it a multiple choice of picking your top two, but I don’t think there is a limit adding option on Google Forms so that would have also messed it up. I realised after being contacted by someone who had did a survey last year that I wish/could have added a ‘Who is your bias wrecker’ question to amend for this, but alas the realisation came too late.

2017 Monbebe Global Survey by wonho_

When I was going through and sharing the survey on Twitter the survey made its way to wonho_ who then contacted me and sent me the survey that she had done last year in 2017. This was the first time I was seeing this but was so happy to have some similar questions that I could then compare my results to! We had some similar questions like I said but a lot of different questions as well. There are some questions she asked that I wish I would have thought of like: Who is your bias wrecker? What was your favorite Monsta X Reality show? And a similar question to the last two on her thread about what you like/dislike about being a Monbebe.

Schedule:

After reviewing the survey I realised that I had a little over 30 questions, so in order to keep everything organized and easy to understand I’ve decided to break down the survey into three main categories: demographics, fundamentals, and music rankings. Each category is going to have a corresponding blog post(s) as well as visual graphics to go along with it. Technically this is the first post in the results-series which is going to have a total of 5. That may seem like a lot, but I’ve separated the open ended questions into their own post so I can write a bit more about them without feeling like I’m making one post super long. Each post is going to build off of one another in hopes to create a coherent picture of all the responses I received.

Lastly I would like to say that even though I am planning to analyse and make connections between the questions I asked there are going to be some questions that are pretty self-explanatory and won’t have much commentary or analysis to them but on the other hand there may be questions that have me saying a million things, so keep that in mind! And I would also just like to throw in one last thank you to everyone who participated in this survey. I had SO much fun doing it and it’s made me super excited to do future projects.

Are you excited to see the results? Like this post if you are!