Background Research
My topic for this study is that of whether or not the average time spent watching sports per week for males is greater than the average time spent watching sports for females for North Olmsted High School. I have decided to not have any specific method to watching the sports, whether it be television, internet, or live. The first thing I did was decided to google things related to my topic. The first thing that I inserted into the Google Search Engine was the phrase “How many hours a day do teenage males spend watching sports compared to females?” One of the very first links to come up was a very interesting one. It seemed that someone from the University of Michigan had already done a study much like my own. However while my study is geared towards the high schoolers at North Olmsted, his study was geared towards the college students at the University of Michigan. His study showed that there was little difference shown between females and males when it comes to watching live sports. This I find is very interesting because most people would think that males watch more sports than women. However, it also says that males watch around eight hours of televised sports while females only watch a little over three hours in that category. This will be very useful when it comes time for me to go about my own study. <http://voices.yahoo.com/study-college-women-like-watching-live-sports-as-much-507867.html>
The next thing I did was go back to google. However, I decided to change the phrase I used to try and find something different out. I changed the phrase I typed into google into “Hours spent watching sports for teenagers.” From this I found, that ESPN and Fox Sports are dominating the sports television industry. However, I also found out that they are actually losing money and viewers compared to last year. Analyst found this odd because of the always growing number of options for different types of sports to watch now. <http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/5432/time-spent-watching-tv-sports-declines-espn-fox.html>.
Also off of the same search, I found another study. Although the study is aimed at how many hours a week children do school work. The study does mention that the amount of time the average child from ages 6-17 spend about 14 hours a day watching television. Also that girls from that age ground spend around six hours a week playing some type of activity outside while boys from the age ground spend around ten. Also it mentions how girls spend less time than boys their age participating in sports. This is an interesting article because although it was based on academics, it had a lot of information which will be useful for my study. The amount of time spent watching television will help me gain an understanding of around how much time a person could be watching sports. And the amount of time spent outside will help me also gain an understanding that males tend to be more attracted to sports which might have some sort of effect on the amount of sports that they watch. <http://www.ur.umich.edu/0405/Dec06_04/20.shtml>