Psychology Empirical Research Activity:

Australian Rules football – Is it too dangerous?

    Australian Rules football is arguably the most popular sport in Australia, yet recent studies, including one by The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, have shown that it is in fact the second most dangerous sport in Australia (going by the number of injuries). Injuries are common in the AFL as the game requires players to regularly put their bodies on the line. Injuries play a major part in every team’s season as, when key players are injured, it can affect the performance of a team and, if many players on one team’s list are injured, the playing team will become inexperienced. In 2006 several players broke their legs, one player had to have one of his kidneys removed and another player injured his neck and was forced to prematurely end his playing career. Most games of Australian Rules football have at least one injury and because of the likelihood many players wear taping all over their body to prevent joint and muscle soreness. Players can be injured when jumping high into the air in marking contests and landing heavily, getting tackled while sprinting and in heavy collisions with opponents while on the ground collecting the ball. Many people are worried that if more rules are not put in place soon then the injuries could become worse, eventually making Aussie Rules football an undesirable game to play and watch.

     lf the attitudes of the general public were put out into the open then perhaps more would be done about injuries in Australian Rules football because, especially of late, the AFL administration has been keen to do almost anything in order to make the public perception of the game better. Recently the administration have changed some of the rules, introduced a tougher tribunal, and added more entertainment during games. If the general public, especially the main demographic of males, were against the dangerousness of the game then more rules would be implemented to prevent the perception and the amount of injuries.

     The tri-component theory of attitudes claims that any attitude will be made up of three components: affective, behavioral and cognitive. The affective component is basically the participant’s feeling, for example a subject in this test may have been outraged at Aussie Rules football for being so dangerous. The behavioral component is how somebody acts, for example somebody may prevent their children from playing Aussie Rules football because of their attitude toward it. The cognitive component is somebody’s beliefs about something, for example somebody may believe that AFL players are stupid as they could easily wreck their lives with an injury in any game. However, many psychologists believe that the theory is not entirely correct. They claim that the behavioral component can sometimes contradict the other two components in what is known as cognitive dissonance. For example, someone may believe that Aussie Rules football is outrageously dangerous and violent, yet attend a match with a friend to support a side. In this example the cognitive component doesn’t comply with the behavioral component, yet the person’s attitude is still against football.

     One of the first studies testing the tri-component theory of attitudes was conducted by American sociologist La Piere (1934). La Piere wanted to test whether there was a difference between the attitude people in America expressed towards people of different racial backgrounds (in this case Asians) and the same people’s behavior toward them (e.g. discrimination). To do this La Piere traveled all over America with a Chinese couple, visiting many restaurants and hotels, taking note of people’s behavior toward them. La Piere was quite surprised when he found that they were treated well in about half of the places they visited. To then test the attitudes of the same people La Piere sent out questionnaires to all of the places he had visited about 6 months afterwards. Half of them replied and surprisingly only one confirmed that they would allow members of the Chinese race as guests in their establishment. Problems with this research include the fact that the people that served them in the restaurants and hotels could have been different to the people that filled in the questionnaires and La Piere’s presence with the couple may have changed some people’s behavior.

     This research activity was designed to test the general public’s attitude toward the dangerousness of Aussie Rules football by using the Likert Scale. The Likert Scale gives any person’s attitude toward anything, in this case Aussie Rules football, a numerical value. A survey which uses the Likert scale will normally have five options given for each statement ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Each option is given a numerical value from one to five and, depending on whether the statement agrees with the researcher’s hypothesis or not, they could be ascending or descending. Positive and negative statements are mixed around to make sure the participant isn’t biased in any way, and to keep them thinking. Some advantages of using the Likert scale to research include that the quantitative data can be easily graphed, averaged and compared with other peoples and large masses of people can be tested in little time. A disadvantage is that the individual’s responses wouldn’t go into as much detail as they would in a case study so some of the conclusions can be limited.

    The independent variable, a variable which is manipulated by the researcher, for this experiment was the age and gender of all participants. The dependent variable, a variable which measures the effects of the independent variable, for this experiment was the Likert scale score. It is hypothesised that, on average, females with have a stronger positive attitude toward the dangerousness of Australian Rules football than the males will (they will think it is too dangerous). Furthermore females over the age of 35 will believe it is more dangerous than all of other age groups do. The higher somebody scores on the survey, the more dangerous they think Australian Rules football is.