"Male Teenage Athletes: The Violent and the Volatile"

High school and college athletes are often upheld as the stars of their schools—popular, physically fit leaders that their classmates look up to and admire. But the reputations of young male athletes have taken a serious hit in recent years. First, in 2006, three members of the Duke men's lacrosse team were accused of sexually assaulting a young woman at a team party held at the house of two of the team's captains. Although all charges were ultimately dropped and the rape accusations were found to be false, the reputations of athletes everywhere were called into question. Just months after the Duke story hit the evening news, the media reported the results from a new sociological study showing that "Contact Sports Lead to Aggression" (Women24 2007) and "Male Adolescent Athletes More Likely to Be Aggressors."

These headlines were reporting the results of a recent study that showed that teenage boys who play football and other contact sports are often aggressive off the field, too. Do athletics promote violence? And if so, why? The answers can be found by closely examining the research of Penn State sociologist Derek A. Kreager (2007), whose study "Unnecessary Roughness? School Sports, Peer Networks, and Male Adolescent Violence" was published in the American Sociological Review. Kreager analyzed data from a national sample of more than 6,000 male high school students. The sample was taken from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a large multiyear survey of American secondary school students. The survey asked questions about school activities (including sports), grades, friendship networks, and troubled behavior—such as fighting and minor delinquency. Specifically, the students were asked whether they had gotten into a "serious physical fight" in the past twelve months.

The Kreager study showed that boys who were on the football or wrestling team were more likely than other male students to have gotten into a serious physical fight in the past year. Overall, 40 percent of the boys in the sample had a serious physical fight in the past year, but these proportions ranged from 45 percent of football players and 48 percent of wrestlers to just 38 percent of nonathletes. Boys in other sports, such as basketball and baseball, however, did not have a heightened rate of physical fights.

Kreager also attempted to answer "why?" and found different explanations for the off-the-field aggressive behaviors of football players versus wrestlers. In the case of the wrestlers, he found that wrestling did not necessarily "cause" aggression. Rather, he found support for the "social selection" perspective. That means that boys who were more aggressive at the outset were more likely to join the wrestling team. In other words, aggressive tendencies led to joining the wrestling team, rather than the reverse.

In the case of football players, however, Kreager found that one's social ties mattered. Football players who associated off the field with other football players were more likely to get into fights. He speculated that "males in football groups have to demonstrate their masculinity to their friends by fighting." He also noted that groups of football players may find themselves in social settings that foster violence, such as parties with alcohol.

Kreager's work illustrates several important themes of sociology. First, he showed that it is possible to conduct a scientific study of a behavior that most people take for granted as "obvious"—the aggressive behavior of male athletes. Second, the study shows the importance of having a "sociological imagination," or having the ability to look beyond individualized explanations of human behavior and to consider the larger social context. Although parents and coaches may turn a blind eye to athletes' aggressive behavior, thinking that "boys will be boys" or that violent behavior reflects the personal problems of one particularly aggressive boy, sociologists like Kreager believe that context shapes human behavior.

It is important that Kreager found that it's not just male athletes who are aggressive. Although 48 percent of wrestlers had a fight in the prior year, the proportion of the overall sample who had a fight wasn't dramatically lower—40 percent had done so. That suggests that the culture of how young men are raised may encourage aggressive behavior. The culture of competitive sports, in particular, may foster aggression among high school male athletes. Kreager's study suggests that violence is not inevitable, and it can be lessened with thoughtful school practices. He suggests that "precluding problematic youth from playing contact sports, not tolerating athletic violence, fostering a more tolerant atmosphere...[and] de-emphasizing the ‘winning is everything' mentality" may help to lessen adolescent male violence.