Possession
Research Introduction
Embedded Files
Where it Began
My research started at my team's own 1 yard line, with me as a quarterback gazing across 99 more yards to score a game winning touchdown in the Super Bowl. When I first began to brainstorm potential topics for my research project over the 2025 summer, I revisited a topic I discovered the previous school year during the AP Seminar course. As part of a research proposal pitch, our class was assigned to find potential topics for which our group could study, leading me to discover the topic of a correlation between sports and crime. Over the summer, I began to delve into the topic by reading instances of sports violence following or during sporting events. My preliminary research began to reveal that there did appear to be a relationship between American professional sporting events and fluctuations in crime. I was gaining yards and got a first down for my team, 89 yards to go.
Considering this knowledge, I continued to collect more sources that discussed that there was a clear causation of crime because of sporting events. However, it was essential to note that there was a variety of confounding variables that also may contribute to the fluctuations in crime. These variables may include, but are not limited to, alcohol consumption, sports rivalry games, championships, the city the game is in, and availability of local law enforcement. Considering each factor’s role in potentially affecting crime rates, I then moved to try and narrow my scope. I hit a roadblock in the preliminary stages as I came to a stall point in discovering academic sources that have previously studied the correlations between sports and crime. Even trying to switch my key search terms from America, sports, crime rates/ fluctuations, to a specific crime, such as property crime or a city like Denver, I was finding nothing. It was like being fronted with a 4th & 10 on downs: I had a distance to go but chance to work with. Consistently meeting with my professors, I aimed to narrow my focus further and define the parameters of my research project. During one council, I was informed it may be beneficial to study which specific sport attracts the largest mass of audience to justify my choice of focus and sport. I completed the 4th down and was advancing down the field.
Taking this into account, I used preliminary phrases such as: “Which American professional sport draws the largest audiences?” to justify my potential area of study in regards to the sport. By reading a variety of articles, I found that the National Football League (NFL) of American football has historically attracted the largest audiences of fans and onlookers, prompting me to choose my sport of study. Having set one parameter of my studies to the sport, I began to question how I would possibly define the region of study while allowing myself to have enough available data to study. Counseling with my professors again, I was guided to set a parameter of study to the respective championships of the NFL: the Super Bowl. Therefore, I could have a defined event to focus on and be able to justify my choice as it is the largest event in the sport, thus attracting masses of audiences across the nation. I was also able to set a parameter on the geographic locations by narrowing my focus to the venue city of the Super Bowl and the two participating teams’ respective cities. These parameters allowed me to narrow my area of inquiry drastically through academic justification, shifting my goal and research question. No current sources I have surfaced have used a small-scale database such as those published by police departments.
My proposed methodology would require me to seek crime databases and reports for the needed date range, as posted and available online. This methodology aligns with my own research question as it propels the accuracy of reported data rather than sourcing statistics and crime occurrence from a singular, constant entity posted online. Only sourcing data from one publication, such as the Uniform Crime Report, may present potential bias in my overall process of data collection as it can induce high risks of inaccuracy, limited perspective and overview, and skew results. Aiming to collect data from various sources, I can organize my collected quantitative data into charts/ tables for the respective city.
This methodology of study enables organization between host cities, participating cities, and categories of crime to analyze percent changes between date ranges. However, there is a large and presentable limitation across my research project in the variety of ways local police departments report crime for their city, how often they report it, and which crimes they report. To narrow my scope of data to be analyzed, I am choosing to look specifically at differences in violent crimes before, during, and after the date ranges of the Super Bowl. According to studies such as one done by Huang, Xi, et al. (2022), studying the occurrence of violent crimes (as they do by studying human trafficking) can propel local law enforcement agencies to work on prevention and intervention strategies. If a certain desired crime is not reported by the local police department in the database or sourced report, I can list it as a large limitation to my study and label it as insufficient to make a conclusion for that city. For teams that are based on the state, not the city (i.e., Carolina Panthers), I will base the crime region on the respective venue of the city. For instance, the Panthers stadium is in Charlotte, NC, so to stay consistent in the project, I will look at crime fluctuations in Charlotte, not state-wide. After collecting all my data, I can draw possible conclusions on which crimes spike or decrease in a host city/ participating cities, and if they are significant. I am currently anticipating meeting a multitude of challenges through my methodology, yet I can constantly rely on previous studies to work around barriers and make conclusions. Completions were being thrown on the field: I advanced through my project to another set of downs and was now staring down 70 more yards to score a touchdown: the completion and submission of my whole project.
Page updated
Report abuse