High School Sporting Event Attendance
We began our background research by going to <http://www.google.com> and initiating a search using the phrases, “student attendance at high school sporting events,” “high school freshmen and senior comparison studies,” “high school freshmen and senior attendance of sporting events,” and “freshman and senior sporting event attendance.” However, these searches failed to provide any relevant information—the sources that were found by the search engine concerned high school sports eligibility, participation in high school sports, high school class attendance, and comparisons between high school and collegiate class attendance (none of which mattered for our study). On the other hand, when we used the phrase, “high school freshman and senior comparison studies in attendance of sporting events,” we were able to find two somewhat-relevant sources:
The first source contained a comprehensive report on student attendance at collegiate sporting events. Although this report did not conduct studies on high school sporting attendance or distinguish between academic class attendance, it did conduct studies concerning overall attendance of various collegiate sporting events and provide insight into the driving forces behind student attendance in sporting events. Andrew Guerra, the author of the comprehensive report, found that, “As a whole, the average score for student affinity [for sports] was a 7.1 (out of 10) and 81% of students attended at least one live sporting event at their university.”
The second source contained a study that offered ideas on how to get more college students to attend sporting events. Although this study was not based on high school sporting attendance and did not distinguish between academic class attendance, it provided research regarding the various reasons, excuses, and conflicts that prevent students from attending sporting events and offered numerous solutions to increase attendance. Rachel Axon, the author of the article, explained that, “Personal errands, hanging out with friends and family, and using the internet were the biggest competing interests in deciding whether students attended three or more games.” Such competing factors will affect the proportion of attendees in both populations of our study as well.
In finality, we determined that no such study specific to our question of interest has been conducted. While we were able to obtain somewhat-relevant sources and studies, we were unable to find any sources explicitly relating to high school freshman and senior attendance of school-sponsored sporting events. Due to the specificity of our study, we will have to rely on our own data in order to answer our question.