Does Playing Contact Sports Make Men More Aggressive To Their Peers And Relationships? (Research Proposal Sample)

Literature Review: Does Playing Contact Sports Make Men More Aggressive To Their Peers And Relationships?
Tevin McCleave
Towson University
Chapter one
Introduction
According to Smith & Stewart (2003), contact sports include the type of sports that require great physical contact between the participants or the players. An example of such contact sports includes mixed martial art, rugby, and hockey amongst others. These sports involve a lot of aggressiveness and a form of violence amongst the players. In most cases, the player’s normal life is affected by the sports.
Contact sporting involves sports that are physical in nature. Most of the players that are involved in contact sporting show some form of developed violence that can be attributed to this kind of sporting. Prior research shows that due to the physical nature of contact sports, the participants should always remain aggressive and violent towards their opponents so as to have a win over them. As a result of this continued aggression and violence, the participants end up getting used to the violence way of life and they even live their lives with it as part of their normal life. In most cases, the participants of the contact sports tend to be physical and violence even towards other members of the society (Smith & Stewart, 2003). There are instances where the participants get violent towards their family members. In most cases, they do it unknowingly since they have been used to being violent. The nature of the sports that they are involved in completely takes over their lives. They find themselves being violent to everyone around them even outside the playground.
There have been disputes all along on the level of aggression and violence in males and females who participate in the contact sports. Most scholars have suggested that males are more violent than females who equally participate in the contact sports (Stevens, 2012).
Purpose of the Study
The main purpose of the current study paper is to investigate whether the contact sports do make men physical towards their family members as well as their other peers. The study will use a qualitative method that have a cross-sectional design. A cross-sectional study will be carried out to investigate the magnitude and the existence of the causal effects that one or more independent variables have on the dependent variable. The design will make use of a cross-sectional regression. In this study, the relationship between the player’s aggression and the contact games will be studied in a time series analysis. A cross sectional design holds that the two variables differ in time series analysis and the behavior of one of the variables is traced through time analysis. In this paper, the dependent variable, the aggression of the players will be studied over time. Data will be collected through the use of questionnaires. The variables involved in this study will be the contact sport as the independent variable and aggression and violence as the dependent variable. The sample size will be composed of forty participants in whom twenty are players of a contact sport while the other twenty will not be players in any contact sport. These people will be gotten from various teams that play contact games. There will be two questionnaires, one for each player and one for a member of their family. The participants will have to be willing to volunteer to give information as no reward will be given. The study approach is a between-subject design. Analysis of the data is expected to be carried out into SPSS. The process of data analysis is very demanding as it involves a lot of arduous and repetitive tasks. SPSS is data analysis software that helps to make the process easier. Data collected through the use of a questionnaire will be feed into the SPSS software and the analysis of that data will made easier and accurate. The SPSS software will aid in drawing of diagrams such as graphs to aid in the interpretation of the data. This is because SPSS has commands that can be used to instruct SPSS to draw graphs that help in data interpretation.
Scope of the study
This study focuses on investigating whether the contact sports have a negative impact on the lives of the players. The study aims at investigating how the players relate to their family members and other peers. This will form a basis for supporting the debate on whether contact sports make the players be physical and violence towards their family members and their peers.
The significance of the study
This study will play a great role in understanding how contact sports affect the normal lives of the players. The study will form a foundation to understand whether the players’ relation with other members of the society who include their family members as well as their peers if negatively impacted by contact sports. Earlier studies have shown that the contact sports make the players more aggressive and physical. The finding of this study will help understand the extent to which the relationship between the players and other society members is affected.
Chapter Two
Literature Review
The scholar articles include both qualitative and quantitative studies on the topic of discussion. Also, the articles for the literature review were obtained from various sites including research databases and the Internet. The search criteria were narrowed using the study variables and terms such as aggression, contact sports, violence, and effect of Athletics on aggression. Additionally, the articles reviewed were narrowed to studies from 2000 to 2015. The most important themes discussed in the literature review include contact sports, aggression towards the peers and aggressiveness of the male individuals towards their relationships. The most used keywords in this review include contact sports, violence, aggression and aggressiveness.
Contact Sports
Klimczak, Podstawski and Dobosz (2014) assert that contact sporting activities usually are the main causes of some unexplainable and unjustifiable acts of violence in society. This is mainly because they create an extreme sense of violence in the participants, which causes them to be violent towards other community members. There are various factors that handle the violence exhibited by the participants of this contact sporting activities. The main contributing factor for the violent behavior is the presence of media in the sports. This has promoted violence, and aggression across the world as people get to access information of such actions elsewhere in the world. As such, the media serves as a tool for incitement creating more acts of violence and aggression associated with contact sports activities. There have been incidences where such acts of violence and aggression have been transferred to the social relationships contact players have, affecting how they interact with the rest of the society.
Violence
Many contact players get used to the violence they usually show towards each other. With time, they end up taking it as their normal way of life. As a result, it is common for some of them to turn out violent towards the people who are around them. Papps (2004), notes that this form of violence is common among male to make physical interactions during the sports. The psychological effect of such violence is that these players get used to violence and often get annoyed quickly, which causes those to be abusive in nature as far as their relations with family members, members of the opposite sex and other society members are concerned.
Aggression or Aggressiveness
Klimczak et al. (2014) indicates that aggression refers to the act of initiating harmful fights or converting objective verbal arguments into those that causes distress to the other person. Also, aggression consists of the harmful attacks made by an individual on another individual. Aggression leads to aggressiveness and is considered increased by contact sports among the men. The aggressiveness of men affects the way they relate to the other peers and mates. Most of the contact players are aggressive due to the nature of their sports. They need the aggressiveness in the field for them to win their opponents. Unfortunately, just like with violence this triggers their minds and affects them psychologically. As a result, they transfer this attitude and behavior outside the field, which causes them to show great aggression when dealing with other members of the society.
Aggressiveness towards relationships and peers
The work of Stevens (2012) shows that the teenage male individuals who participate in sports such as football, hockey and basketball are considered attractive to the opposite sex, that is, female teenagers. However, some recent research indicates that the athletes who participate in these athletic sports have abusive behaviors against their partners and others as compared other male counterparts who do not participate in such sports. According to Parkinson (2011), some sporting events such as football and basketball causes the hyper-masculine attitudes among the men. These hypermasculine attitudes exhibited by the men in such sports can easily lead to the development of aggressive behaviors when not in the field. The aggressive behaviors are mostly directed to the vulnerable women in the society. Besides, the National Institute of Justice (2005) indicates that a male partner assaults over one million female gender individuals physically. Most of these female gender assaults are linked to the male aggressiveness acquired for contact sports such as basketball that is common among the individuals in the United States.
How does contact sports cause aggression?
Lemieux, McKelvie, and Stout (2002) conducted a study to determine the association between participation in athletic contact sports and hostile aggression away from the field. The results of the study showed t...