My Research: Why and How?
I feel that there has not been sufficient research on the area of sports violence and that information is very limited. Violence is so prevalent in our society and sports have become a staple in society and continue to grow day by day becoming ingrained in society (Westerman & Tamborini, 2005).
The two areas which I chose to focus on were the enjoyment of sports violence and the distinction between levels of aggression. These were areas I felt needed more research. I chose not to look at gender because the researched seemed very straightforward and I thought it would be unlikely that I would find anything to add to the discussion. Additionally, the medium of my research was not conducive to looking at gender.
From the previous research, one would assume that all fans enjoyed sports violence and I want to particularly look at this thought of enjoying sports violence because from my experience with sports, while the violence can be entertaining, excessive violence does not sit well with me personally and many other sports fans that I know.
Additionally, when discussing the levels of aggression, researchers seemed to focus on strictly violent and nonviolent sports placing sports such as football, basketball, and hockey in the violent category and not looking within that category to determine their differences in levels of violence. It is my belief that there are different levels of aggression within those violent labeled sports which should be researched. For this reason, I specifically chose to only research sports which are label violent.
My research methods involved observation of public behavior on the website ESPN.com and individual interviews with users on the website. I picked several stories involving some violent act on the website, one from the NFL, one from the NHL, and one from the NBA, and observed users comments and reactions to the stories. I chose to pick one from the NFL, NHL, and NBA because these are three of the highest profile contact sports which garner the most attention for violence. After summarizing each story, assessing the comments, and gathering comments of interest, which where comments that represented the various feelings towards the violence, I was able to come to a conclusion about the overall feelings towards the violence. In the interviews I asked individual users questions to assess their attitudes towards violence in sports. The interviews questions were not specifically looking to answer the research question as a whole but to serve as a backbone for understanding how and why the users were responding to the sports articles on ESPN.com.
