Clarence Robbins [see photo at right] and Marjorie Gene Robbins visited theme parks hoping to find a good, representative mix of hairy-headed strangers. They then wrote a study called Hair Length in Florida Theme Parks: An Approximation of Hair Length in the United States of America. It tells how Robbins and Robbins gathered data, combed through it, and extrapolated the strands to gain new understanding.
Clarence Robbins and Marjorie Gene Robbins were leading researchers at Clarence Robbins Technical Consulting, a thinktank located in their home in Clermont, Florida, near to four big theme parks – Epcot, Universal Studios, the Magic Kingdom and MGM Studios. In visiting those parks, the researchers set themselves a simple, clear goal: “to obtain data on the percentage of persons in the US with different lengths of scalp hair”.
The goal was not so easily attained….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.