Effects of Sports Obsession on Social Life - Term Paper Example

?Effects of Sports Obsession on Social Life Today, sports has become an important part of modern life particularly for those living in urban areas. More and more people, both children and adults are engaged in a sporting activity either as players or followers. The numbers of both of these groups has been increasing steadily over the years due to the many advantages associated with both. For players, sporting comes with numerous health benefits. For instance, Sports provide the body with adequate physical exercise. Sports often involve physical activities like running, jumping, stretching and moving about which turn out to be a good body workout. Playing sports is energy put to good use. Engaging in sports since an early age strengthens the bones and muscles and tones the body. It helps to increase stamina and endurance. Games that involve running, kicking or throwing a ball help strengthen the arms and legs; for instance soccer and cricket. Swimming provides a full body workout. Hence, sports provide the body with complete exercise and engaging in sports directly translates into overall fitness. For followers, it is very beneficial for the development of social skills. Sports teach one how to interact with people, communicate with them and collaborate as a team. Sports foster collective thinking and harness planning and delegation skills too. Sports build confidence. Winning a game gives a person a sense of accomplishment, which boosts their confidence further. Playing sports involves directed thinking. Indeed, studies show that kids who play sports regularly fare well in academics and do well in school and college. Sports could also be said to have the ability to increase one's happiness (Pocock, Skinner & Williams 25). However, some people spend too much time on it, and this is applicable to both playing and following. For players, persons obsessed with sports play every day and every season without taking a break to focus on other non-sporting activities, like spending time with friends, studying (among students) and establishing strong social relationships. For instance, a student may spend most of their time trying to qualify for a sporting event and, in the process, completely fail to study or socialize with other students of their immediate families. Adults may also become entangled in this web when they spend almost all of their free time either playing or watching their favorite sport. Victims of sports obsession often become disconnected with elements of their life not directly related to their obsession. Hence, the victims may only socialize with people who share their passion. Unfortunately, this is usually a very small proportion as compared to their list of friends and family members, such as a few workmates who meet every evening to watch or play their favorite game. As a result, the social life of victims is normally damaged significantly. As a result of the possible injurious effects of sports obsession, this paper will investigate whether obsession with a sport increases the chances of one having problems in their social relationships. Method A sample of 40 participants was used in the formulation of this research. All 40 participants were undergraduates of San Diego State University Imperial Valley Campus at the time of the study. Males constituted 65% (26 males) of the respondents, while females constituted 35% of the respondents (14 females). The ages of the respondents varied from 18 to 35 years of age, setting the mean age of the respondents at 22.6 years. The sample was randomly chosen from the San Diego State University Imperial Valley Campus student population. A questionnaire was utilized to assess each respondent’s self-assessment. The main takeaways embedded in the survey were the respondents’ sports activity interests and social life. The first five questions in the survey consisted of independent variables such as gender, age, marital status, ethnicity, religion, and the respondents’ marital status. These questions were categorical, except for age, which was a continuous variable. The sixth question was on the respondent’s favorite sport followed by hours spent watching sports, number of close friends, and number of hours spent with family. Next was how likely one was to miss a religious event, social event and school, and likelihood of missing to watch a sporting peer. These questions were followed by importance of social life, importance of spending time with family, importance of sports in life, importance of sports in TV, one’s satisfaction with their social life, one’s satisfaction with their academic life, and one’s satisfaction with their love life. Procedure The participants were chosen via convenience sampling, meaning that whoever was available and willing to complete the survey at the moment, became one of the forty respondents. The respondents were not informed of the aim of the study, rather they were asked if they were willing to participate in a sports survey in which they were not going to be identified and the survey would not collect personal identifiers such as name or any unique identification number. A disclaimer was also added at the top of the survey, stating they may withdraw from doing the survey at any moment, and they were given an e-mail to contact if they had any questions about the study. Most of the participants were cooperative. Results and Discussion Descriptive analysis of the respondents shows that 12.5% (5 persons) of respondents were married, 85% (34 persons) were single while 2.5% (1 person) was divorced. In terms of race, 85% (35 persons) were Hispanic, 2.5% (1 persons) African American, and 12.5% (5 persons) Caucasian. The analysis will mainly focus on establishing correlations between the variables that were measured. The null and alternative hypotheses are as follows: Ho: the more a person is obsessed with sports, the more they are likely to have problems in their social relationships; H1: obsession with sports and problems social relationships are independent; Computation of correlation between importance of social life and hours spent watching sports gives a correlation coefficient of 0.743 (p-value = 0.000, n = 40). This value not only shows that a relation exists between these two variables, but the relation is strong as it approaches 1, which indicates a perfect correlation. The correlation is positive, showing that either importance of social life or hours spent watching sports increases correspondingly as the other variable increases. Under the null hypothesis, it was expected that the correlation should be negative. In contrast, the more a person watches sports, the more they value social relationships. This indicates that watching sports is not likely to result into problems in social relationships. A correlation analysis is conducted between satisfaction with academic performance and how likely one is to miss school. A value of -0.632 is obtained (p-value = 0.000, n = 40). This means that the two variables have a negative correlation, meaning that the more likely one is to miss school, the worse their academic performance, and vice versa. This result is as expected since the number of school days has been found to be proportional to academic performance (Pocock, Skinner & Williams 86). Next, a correlation is done between importance of social life and importance of sports in life. A correlation coefficient of 0.573 is obtained (p-value = 0.000, n = 40). The two variables are positively correlated. Consequently, persons who view sports as an important part of life also view social life as important. The value should have been negative if the null hypothesis were to be accepted. From this value, persons actively engaged in sports are not likely to experience problems in their social relationships. Using these three correlation analyses, we reject the null hypothesis and conclude that obsession with sports and problems social relationships are independent. Findings from a scatterplot of hours spent watching sports and satisfaction with social life shows that the relation between the two variables is negative, implying that as number of hours spent watching sports increases, satisfaction with one’s social life reduces. The regression equation is: Y = 93.78 – 2.15 X Where Y = satisfaction with social life, and X = hours watching sports The regression equation shows that when hours watching sports increases by one unit, satisfaction with social life reduces by 2.15 units. Hence, a person who is obsessed with sports is likely to have less satisfaction with their social life. The survey covered 5 sports events: soccer, football, basketball, baseball, and golf. Among the 5 sports, soccer came out as the most popular (n = 15) followed by football (n = 11), basketball (n = 9) in terms of hours spent watching the sport. In terms of the importance of sport in life, persons watching baseball had the highest score (mean = 79.000) followed by persons watching football (mean = 69.133), basketball (mean = 68.444), golf (mean = 68.000), and finally football (mean = 60.909). Hence, persons watching baseball have the highest regard for the importance of sport in life while football fans come last. Correlations Hours ImSocialLife Hours Pearson Correlation 1 .743** Sig. (2-tailed) .000 N 40 40 ImSocialLife Pearson Correlation .743** 1 Sig. (2-tailed) .000 N 40 40 **. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). Correlations AcademicPerformance School AcademicPerformance Pearson Correlation 1 -.632** Sig. (2-tailed) .000 N 40 40 School Pearson Correlation -.632** 1 Sig. (2-tailed) .000 N 40 40 **. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). Correlations ImportanceSport ImSocialLife ImportanceSport Pearson Correlation 1 .573** Sig. (2-tailed) .000 N 40 40 ImSocialLife Pearson Correlation .573** 1 Sig. (2-tailed) .000 N 40 40 **. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). Report ImportanceSport Sport Mean N Std. Deviation Soccer 69.1333 15 19.49676 Football 60.9091 11 28.96707 Basketball 68.4444 9 18.92823 Baseball 79.0000 3 9.53939 Golf 68.0000 2 5.65685 Total 67.4000 40 21.31305 Work cited Pocock, Barbara, Skinner, Natalie & Williams, Philippa. Time Bomb. Work rest and play in Australia today, New South Publishing, Sydney, 2012. Print. Read More