I created a survey on the relation between a cosplayer’s actual personality and social identity and the persona and social identity of their cosplays.
I distributed this survey online and at the “Syracuse NY Comic Con” at the Syracuse Fairgrounds, and received 35 responses.
The questions and a breakdown of the answers can be found here.
Some salient trends in the responses included the fact that 60% of the participants generally created costumes for characters who have fairly similar personalities; that 58% of cosplayers wished they were more like their characters and 78% said their characters’ personalities affected the way they acted; that only about a quarter of cosplayers have cosplayed as a different race while approximately half have done so with gender; and that only 11% of cosplayers have used cosplayed to make a social or political statement.
Chris Wildrick 