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©2011 Beth Adubato ALL RIGHTS RESERVED FANNING THE FLAMES: TELEVISED, PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL GAMES AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE by Beth Adubato A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-Newark, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Criminal Justice written under the direction of Dr. Ronald Clarke and approved by __________________________________________ Dr. Ronald Clarke (chair) ________________________________________ Dr. James Finckenauer ____________________________________________ Dr. Joel Miller _____________________________________________ Dr. Paul Boxer (outside reader) Newark, New Jersey May 2011 ABSTRACT Fanning the Flames: Televised, Professional Football Games and Domestic Violence Dissertation Director: Dr. Ronald Clarke Images of athletes as criminal suspects seldom shock society; newspapers run “police blotters” in their sports sections. “Doping” presents a serious problem among Olympians, professional team players, and even cyclists of the Tour de France. Sports fans across Europe, Asia, and South America have wreaked deadly havoc on each other after soccer matches. With all of these obvious associations, criminology still lags behind psychology in the inclusion of the study of sports within its purview. Throughout the rest of the world, much of the sports/crime focus is on the fans—so-called “hooliganism.” This dissertation attempts to address a sports/crime issue in the United States, while largely availing itself of these European hooligan studies. The issue at-hand is whether televised, professional, American football games affect domestic violence. The purpose of this study is to not only examine possible correlation between these two events in one geographical area (namely Philadelphia), but further, to possibly influence sports/crime study in the field of American criminology. A good deal of research into “hooliganism” attributes the behavior to the concept of BIRGing or “Basking in Reflected Glory.” This concept provides much insight into the “highly-identified” sports fan. It is these highly-identified sports fans that this dissertation presumably examined. Most specifically, does the highly-identified sports fan feel a strong bond with his favorite football players and imitate their behavior? Do televised football games bring about copycat, violent behavior? Using the copycat framework, this dissertation research looked at domestic violence arrests in the city of Philadelphia on the days that Eagles games were played, for an eight-hour period, beginning with kick-off time. These relationships were tested using comparison of means tests—both the Levene test and the Mann-Whitney tests. As predicted, there was no difference between the mean average of holidays and football gamedays, This hypothesis was specifically designed to compare football gamedays to those days highly-connected to alcohol consumption. Also as predicted, there was no statistically significant difference between home games and away games, taking away the possible bias that fans were at the game and then became violent, as opposed to watching the game on television. The mean average of domestic violence arrests on football was statistically significantly different from both comparison Sundays and other sports’ gamedays. This study could be expanded to include more years and/or replicated in another city. This study addresses the media hype and misconceptions surrounding football and domestic violence and challenges criminology to expand its field to include sports and crime. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the members of my committee for their insight and guidance—my outside reader from psychology, Paul Boxer, who has conducted much research on the effects of media and violence…Joel Miller, who enlightened me on the statistical parts of this study and also contributed to the theoretical portion…James Finckenauer, who has an uncanny ability to clearly point-out the unclear and who showed great enthusiasm for the topic, as the one actual sports fan on the committee…and my chair, Ronald Clarke, who helped me to form this study from its complicated roots, to cull the unnecessary from the literature review, who painstakingly went through every word and showed me how journalistic writing differs from academic writing, and who helped me to see the error of my ways in table-making. I also wish to thank Corporal Len DeMalto of the Research and Planning Unit of the Philadelphia Police Department, without whose patient help this study would not have been possible. Special thanks should be given to my student colleagues who helped me in many, invaluable ways. Also deserving of praise are the students who have taken my classes over the years, as they have taught me much. Finally, I would like to thank my family for supporting me in iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Summary—p. viii Introduction—p. 7 --Genesis of Study --Most Dangerous Day of the Year—p. 8 CHAPTER I--Sports and Crime—p. 10 --Frenzy—p. 11 --Fans—p. 14 --Social Identity—p. 16 --Team Identification—p. 23 --NFL BIRGing—p. 25 --Sports Fans: The Numbers—p. 27 --Machismo—p. 27 --Hooliganism—p. 30 --Spectator Violence in North America—p. 34 --Self-Reported Spectator Violence—p. 34 --The Promise of Violence—p. 35 --Superstars—p. 36 --Out of Bounds—p. 37 --Chapter Summary—p. 40 CHAPTER II--Media and Crime—p. 42 --Studies on Effects of Violent Media—Television—p. 42 --Effects on Children—p. 43 --Making the Case for Media and Aggression—p. 44 --More Violent Visuals—p. 47 --Video Games—p. 49 --Chapter Summary—p. 51 CHAPTER III—Domestic Violence—p. 53 --What is Domestic Violence?—p. 53 --Pros and Cons—p. 56 --“Go O.J. Go!”—p. 59 --Domestic Violence in Philadelphia—p. 60 --Chapter Summary—p. 60 CHAPTER IV—Previous Studies—p. 62 iv --Football and Fan-Aggression Studies—p. 62 --Advantages and Limitations—p. 67 --Additional Limitations and Advantages—p. 70 --Chapter Summary—p. 71 CHAPTER V—Theoretical Framework—p. 72 --Copycat Crime/Media Violence Framework —p. 77 --Copycat Research—p. 79 --Mechanism—p. 80 --Hypotheses—p. 83 --Theoretical Framework/Flowchart—p. 84 --Chapter Summary—p. 85 CHAPTER VI—Methods—p. 86 --Research Design—p. 86 --Sample—p. 88 --Sample Limitations—p. 89 --Data—p. 90 --Data Sets—p. 91 --Measures—p. 93 --Analysis Plan—p. 95 --Chapter Summary—p. 96 CHAPTER VII—Results—p. 98 --Findings—p. 98 --Additional Findings—p. 118 --Chapter Summary—p. 122 CHAPTER VIII—Discussion—p. 123 --Introduction—p. 123 --Wins vs. Losses—p. 124 --Rivals and Playoffs—p. 125 --Home vs. Away—p. 125 --Holidays—p. 126 --Football Compared to Other Major Sports—p. 127 --Football Gamedays vs. the Average Sunday—p. 129 --Domestic Rape—p. 130 --Chapter Summary—p. 130 CHAPTER IX—Conclusion—p. 132 --Summary of Findings—p. 132 --Theoretical Implications—p. 133 --Findings and Theory—p. 136 --Branches of the Flowchart—p. 136 v --Policy Implications—p. 138 --Alternative Explanations/Future Studies—p. 141 --Conclusion—p. 147 Bibliography—p. 151 Appendix—p. 163 --Data Charts—p. 163 --SPSS results—p. 169 --Fact sheet for Governor Rendell—p. 192 --Domestic Crime Incidents for 2009 by Code, Time and Day—p. 194 Curriculum Vitae—p. 197 TABLES Table 1 “Media Generated Crime”—p. 76 Table 2 “Designing Out Biases”—p. 82 Table 3 “Philadelphia Football Game Days”—p. 93 Table 4 “Descriptive Statistics for Domestic Violence Arrests”—p. 94 Table 5 “Descriptive Statistics by Comparison Groups”—p. 95 Tables 6-33—Tables for each statistical test run for each comparison group—pages 96-115. vi SUMMARY Images of athletes as criminal suspects seldom shock society; newspapers run “police blotters” in their sports sections in a matter-of-fact manner. “Doping” presents a serious problem among Olympians, professional team players, and even cyclists of the Tour de France. Sports and crime are no strangers to each other; for example, sports and crime intersect with illegal betting. Cheating is often discovered during the Olympics— our planet’s most noble and all-encompassing goodwill event. Sports fans across Europe, Asia, and South America have wreaked deadly havoc on each other after soccer matches. With all of these obvious associations, criminology still lags behind psychology in the inclusion of the study of sports within its purview. In the United States, the crimes athletes are accused of range from public fighting to domestic violence to rape and murder. Throughout the rest of the world, much of the sports/crime focus is on the fans—so-called “hooliganism.” It is in the area of hooliganism studies that criminology addresses sports and crime most prominently. This dissertation attempted to address a sports/crime issue in the United States, while largely availing itself of these European hooligan studies. The issue at-hand is whether televised, professional, American football games affect domestic violence. The purpose of this study is to not only examine possible correlation between these two events in one geographical area (namely Philadelphia), but further, to influence 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. A good deal of research into “hooliganism” attributes the behavior to the concepts of BIRGing and CORFing; these acronyms stand for “Basking in Reflected Glory” and “Cutting Off Reflected Failure.” These concepts provide much insight into the “highly- identified” sports fan (as opposed to the casual fan). It is these highly-identified sports fans that this dissertation examines. Most specifically, does the highly-identified sports fan feel a strong bond with his favorite football players and imitate their behavior? Do televised football games bring about copycat, violent behavior? vii Ray Surette—one of the few researchers in the field of criminology to study copycat crimes—states that the anecdotal cases in combination with research on media- copied suicides and studies of the effects of news coverage “establish reasonable grounds that copycat crimes occur, but at an unknown rate” (2002).