Experimental Research

Every week in the NFL players are leaving games due to hits to the helmet. This leaves them with major concussions or spinal injuries that keep them out for weeks at a time. Players have had careers ended due to too many head on collisions such as Troy Aikman, who was one of the best quarterbacks of the 1990s. Darryl Stingley was a wide receiver who played for the New England Patriots in the 1970s. This hit by Jack Tatum on Stingley left Darryl paralyzed as a quadriplegic, confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life up until his death in 2007.

With more and more terrible injuries happening in recent years the NFL has joined up with The Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (CSTE) at the Boston University School of Medicine to do experimental research on the effects of these hits. Over 20 current and former NFL players have agreed to donate their brian and spinal cord tissue to science upon death so that researchers can study the effects of repeated head trauma on the nervous system.

With this experimental research, the NFL is hoping to one day find a cure of how to prevent so many terrible injuries. If a cure can be found it can prevent many future horrific injuries.

Surveys Among Athletes

In the world of professional sports, respect among your fellow peers is a hard thing to get. After battling the same guys, day after day, week after week, year after year, it is hard for everyone to like each other. Even some of the best players in the league get hated on by their fellow athletes. Every year Sports Illustrated runs a survey among ball players to find out how they feel about the league as a whole.

In the 2010 version of the Sports Illustrated NFL Players Survey, 239 professional football players voted Bengals WR Terrell Owens, the most overrated player in the NFL. Owens career numbers include over 1,000 career catches, over 15,000 years, and nearly 145 career touchdowns. Those numbers rank him among the best of all time! It may be more of T.O.'s off the field behavior that his peers don't like. Owens is notoriously known for tearing about locker rooms as he has been on many teams during his career. The rest of the top five overrated football players includes Tony Romo, Mark Sanchez, and Super Bowl MVP Eli Manning.

In the 2008 Sports Illustrated MLB Players Survey, 495 professional baseball players voted New York Yankees legend Derek Jeter the most overrated player in the sport. That is just ridiculous. Jeter is a five time world champion in the sport and arguably a top five, maybe even top three Yankee of all time. If anything Jeter is one of the more underrated athletes because everything he does in my opinion, doesn't get enough credit. Rounding out that top five were All-Stars Alex Rodriguez and David Wright.

What does an All Star have to do to get some respect?

Peer's Blogs About Qualitative Research

The first peer blog i looked at was Kaitlyn's blog. Kaitlyn started a focus group of students up at the York Hill campus of QU to find out how everyone is liking it. I had interest in this because I live at York Hill so these are issues that I deal with too. These issues included the dining options, shuttles, and nursing situations up at the campus. These have been hot topics all year among my friends and hopefully the school will do a real focus group soon to get criticism so they can make good progress going forward.

The second peer blog i looked at was Lisa's blog. I enjoyed it because she talked about the MTV show 'World of Jenks'. Lisa showed us a clip in class about this show and I was very interested in it. I have seen commercials before for it but never been able to catch an episode yet. I think Jenks is a genius for putting together this show. He lives the lives of so many different types of people. It is very fascinating and original. The ethnographic research he does is top notch.

Qualitative Research in the NFL

It is said that the NFL is the most popular sport in America. After the steroid scandals and lockout of 1994 in Major League Baseball it won fans over all over the country. The NFL wanted to know more about their fans. Their likes, dislikes, etc. In 2009 during the Super Bowl week, the company Experian Simmons surveyed as many fans as possible to get as much information as possible.

Through this survey Experian Simmons was able to find out the percentages of anything you could think of. How much is the household income for the average fan? How old is the average fan? What race or ethnicity are they? Do they smoke? How often do they use the internet? How much alcohol do they drink or fast food do they eat? Plus much, much more.

As long as the NFL cuts down on hits like this, they will be able to keep there spot on top of the sports world in America.

Peer's Unobtrusive Research Blogs

Unobtrusive research is happening around us all the time. We take part in this nonstop because we are always observing others and coming to conclusions about them. Lisa Perez made great points about this in her blog from last week. She uses the paparazzi as a very good example. She explains how they are able to follow around celebrities every move without being caught (for the most part). Another student who's blog i enjoyed was Christina Heilman's. She wrote about the presidential election of 2008. Since everyone is obsessed with social media now, Obama and his campaign knew that they had to get involved with facebook, twitter, etc to win the younger votes. And when McCain admitted "he didn't know how to work a computer" I am sure many younger, first time voters didn't like that too much so that gave Obama alot more votes. The unobtrusive research that Obama did to find out that they needed to get on the social media scene led him to the victory. Unobtrusive research is very important. You are doing it all the time, even if you don't even know it.

Peer's Blogs

This weeks assignment was to read the a couple blogs of my fellow students in my PRR 332 class. The first blog I chose to read was my friend Mallory Mullane's blog. I have known Mallory ever since I started at Quinnipiac so I figured it would be interesting to see what is on her mind. Her blogs, so far, have been about one of her first loves, hockey. I, myself, love hockey as well as I am a die hard New York Rangers fan. Even though she is an Islander fan, it was interesting to see what she had to say. Seeing that she has worked for a couple of hockey teams now she knows a lot more than I do about sports public relations, and that is what I would one day love to get into. Mallory would be a good person for me to talk to, to try to get some connections and an inside scoop to the PR world of sports.

The next blog I read was the blog belonging to Katie Warner. Katie's blog is about non-profit public research. I am not to familiar with the whole non-profit side of PR so I wanted to see what it is all about. Seeing as Katie worked for a non-profit company, it is a good place to start. After reading her blog, I got a good idea for what it takes to work in this field. It takes a big heart and passion. The dedication for working for a non-profit company is what makes it successful. You need people who love what they are doing and will  work their hardest no matter what.

How Important Are Ethics?

Growing up in my house, my parents taught me what was right and what was wrong. I learned my manners, i learned what i should say yes to, and i learned what i should say no to. I was always under the impression that morals and ethics were very important and that you needed them going through life. But as you look around at celebrities, or "our role models", you kind of think that since the way that they act without them, are they really important?

Celebrities are always in the news for getting in trouble. They think that they get a free pass because they are looked up too. Just because you are a celebrity, doesn't mean that you can just break you're probation because you want too or drive drunk because you are loved by so many. Their egos just go through the roof and they feel invincible. Like they can do no wrong. And when young kids see this, they could think that it is okay to do.

The worst case that sticks out in my mind is the Chris Brown and Rihanna case. If any guy in the world thinks that it is okay to do this to a woman then they deserve to be in jail for a very long time. Arguably, the biggest lesson my dad taught me growing up was to not lay hands on a girl ever. And a celebrity can go out and do this and get community service? Any normal average joe gets much worse then that. But since it is a celebrity doing it, all he needs to do is apologize on television and he is in the clear. When kids see celebrities, such as the ones above, act the way they do, then the ethics and morals of America and around the world go down the drain quickly.