Sociological Analysis Of Sport

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Pages: 7

One of the reasons why sports has been an integral part of society is because it is a spectator sport for the most part. One can find as much joy in playing the sports as in watching. Most sports are competitive in nature and spectators become a part of this competition when they root for a side or other. Although not directly involved in the action, sports spectator influence teams and players by their inputs just as much as individual and teams in sports exert an outward influence on their fans. If one sticks to just the action on the field they miss out on the dynamics outside. For this reason, it is necessary to use sociology to understand sports. Sociology is a social science that systematically studies human groups and behavior: it focuses …show more content…
Questions such as why golfer tend to be white or Asian would be answered by measuring the physical disposition of each race to dominate the sport. But like we learned in the documentary on race, there is not much that differentiates us when it comes to our physical makeup other than a few distinct traits such as the shape of our nose, eye or our skin color; Relying on outward traits to determine the answer to the question aforementioned would result in erroneous answers since it concerns race which is a social construct. For this reason, one needs to approach it using sociological sciences. By approaching this question from a sociological perspective one realizes that these sports, in general, require capital and by analyzing data on economic class and wealth distribution between races one can conclude that Asians and whites are predominant in this sport because they can afford to play those sports. Another reason why sociology is needed in sport is because of the way data is distributed. For example, when looking at baseball, or football the disparage between those who are minorities (darker of skin for the most part) and Caucasians is very evident. Data shows that in these sports most of the players are minorities whereas those who are coaches and hold executive position are overwhelmingly white/Caucasian. Can this be attributed to the natural sciences? No! …show more content…
Because manhood and sports are intertwined, sports are sometimes seen as a way to express what it means to be a man. Over the years society has been progressing and due to laws such as Title IX, there is a rise in females participating in sport at the college level which correlates with the rise of professional female athletes. Even with this shift, however, we see little to no coverage of female sports. In 2014 “LA-based network affiliates devoted only 3.2 of airtime to women’s sport, down from 5 percent in 1989”(…….). Media outlets such as SportsCenter devote only “2 percent of airtime to women’s sports, a number that has remained flat since the study began tracking the nightly cable broadcast in 1999.”(…..). These statistics are alarming in a society that is progressing towards women equality. The data raises the important question, why? Is media the reason why women sports are not watched? To answer such a question, I plan to gather both qualitative and quantitative information from a wide swath of the American population. The quantitative aspect of this research will be finding the social locus of each person surveyed. This will allow the data to be extracted and grouped into social constructs such as race and physical aspects such as sex. In total, we will have their age, sex, sexual orientation, income, race, current place of residency and nationality. After this set of questions, they will be asked if they watch