Report on the Selection Procedure Based on Readers' Responses to the Original Nine Tales in Denmark. Fairytale: An Interdisciplinary Turco-Danish Study of the Collective v. the Individual Nature of the Response to Literature. Report No. 8. Revised.

Prepared as part of the Turko-Danish Fairytale Project conducted to uncover universal, cross-cultural features in readers' response to literature, this paper reports on a pilot study to determine which three out of nine preselected fairy tales would elicit the most faceted, legitimate response from a population of Danish readers. After explaining the selection of readers, the paper notes the questions used to evoke responses from the readers about the tales and subjects. Answers to a "highly modified" form of content analysis were used to isolate that one tale from each grouping--Danish, Turkish, and outside--that elicited the broadest spontaneous response. The discussion that follows looks at the honesty of the answers, at illegitimate answers (i.e., those that contain erroneous information), and at the effect of the readers comparing the three stories in each group on the answers given. The effects of prereading instructions, classroom discussions of the tales, class makeup, and the structure of the questions themselves on the answers given are also considered. The paper concludes with discussions of the expectations of Danish readers, who are accustomed to the style of Hans Christian Anderson, when perusing fairy tales from other sources, and of the priorities they established when rating Danish, Turkish, and outside fairy tales. (RBW)