Second City: A Replication of a Media and Domestic Violence Study

• In Event: Qualitative Approaches to Culture, Disorganization, and Anomie

Abstract

This study replicated a 2011 study that found football “gamedays”—more specifically the five hours of a gameday, beginning at kick-off--are more highly associated with domestic violence arrests than the average Sunday in Philadelphia (Adubato, 2011). While the results in Philadelphia showed a statistically significant correlation, the study was small (one year) and as such cannot be generalized to all NFL cities.
The “Second City” was Chicago—chosen specifically because of the location of the NFL team, the Bears, and because Chicago represents another city with one professional sports team in each of the four “major sports.” Not every “NFL” city is as easily linked to media markets and not every city has one of the other sports teams to which to compare the domestic violence arrest statistics.
The Philadelphia study attempted to tackle a sports/crime issue in the United States. The findings of this second study could advance sports/crime study in the field of criminology. Like the already “established” areas such as “gender and crime,” and “race and crime,” sports and crime needs to become a much more salient area of criminology.

Authors

• Beth Ellen Adubato, New York Institute of Technology

• Nicole Sachs, Rutgers University