Tucker Center Newsletter - 2009 Fall
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Research Updates
Austin Stair Calhoun and Emily J. Houghton, Kinesiology doctoral students, presented their research on social media at the sixth Conference of the European Association for the Sociology of Sport held in Rome, May, 2009. Their exploratory study—"Examining Elite Sport Representations in Social Media: Conceptualizing Twitter"—captured baseline usage data on Twitter. For those unfamiliar with the term and concept, Twitter is a popular social networking service where users send 140-character micro-blogs to their "followers," meaning those who track their activities. User names on Twitter are designated with the @ symbol (e.g., the Tucker Center’s Twitter username is @TuckerCenter). One of the most popular Web sites worldwide, Twitter remains relatively unexamined by scholars and educators despite its exponential growth and extensive media buzz. This gap in scholarly inquiry persists despite widespread Twitter use by professional athletes (e.g., Lance Armstrong and Dara Torres), professional sport organizations (e.g., WNBA and NFL), and well-known coaches such as Gail Goestenkors and Tim Brewster.
In their study, Calhoun and Houghton documented baseline Twitter presence (e.g., how many teams in the WNBA had Twitter accounts) and
number of followers from a random sample of professional teams/leagues (N=147) and professional athletes (N=113) over eight weeks during the spring of 2009. Preliminary results indicate there was exponential growth among teams, leagues, and athletes. For example, from March to May of 2009, the percentage of WNBA teams with a Twitter presence rose from 62% to 84% (an August 2009 follow-up revealed a 100% presence), while the number of WNBA followers grew from 661 to 3,809 (August 2009: 9,018 followers). Based on these findings, the need for continued research on the impact of social media in sport—particularly for female athletes who have been marginalized by traditional media—and the implications for how gender, class, and race are portrayed in social media is clearly warranted.
Heather Maxwell, former TC Research Assistant and currently serving as Senior Research Associate of Consumer Insights at General Mills Inc., completed her doctoral work on sport, gender, and new media. Dr. Maxwell’s study—"Women’s and Men’s Intercollegiate Basketball Media Coverage on ESPN.com: A Mixed Methods Analysis of a Complete Season"—examined whether patterns of under-representation and marginalization of sportswomen long documented in traditional media also existed in new media, specifically the Internet. Confining her analysis to ESPN.com, Maxwell employed a mixed methods approach to collect data on feature photographs and headline articles related to Division I women’s and men’s college basketball home pages during the 2006-07 season.
Maxwell compared the number of feature photographs and headline articles, and also analyzed the individuals who were featured in the photographs (e.g., coach, player, staff member), as well as how those individuals were portrayed (in/out of uniform; on/off the court; in action/posed). She used content analysis to describe which themes were present in the feature photographs and headline articles. Her results indicated that notions of male power and dominance routinely found in traditional sport media were both challenged and reproduced on the Internet. For example, male and female basketball players were equally as likely to have feature photographs and be presented
in uniform and on the court. Interestingly, female basketball players were significantly more likely to be shown
in action than were their male counterparts—a finding which directly challenges patterns of male dominance present in mainstream media. In contrast to this unexpected result, male dominance continued to be reinforced in that men’s basketball received significantly more headline articles and game-reporting articles than did women’s basketball. Maxwell’s findings illustrate that Internet sport media coverage can simultaneously challenge and reproduce portrayals of female athletes.
Alicia Johnson, undergraduate at Minnesota State University-Mankato and Tucker Center summer intern, helped Calhoun and LaVoi expand their research project, "Examining Online Intercollegiate Head Coaches’ Biographies: Reproducing or Challenging Heteronormativity and Heterosexism?" The initial study, which included only Big 10 coaches, was expanded to include a nationwide sample of Division I head coaches. Results from the initial study will be featured in the fall newsletter of It Takes A Team—an educational program sponsored by the Women’s Sports Foundation and designed to end homophobia in sport.