An article that I found in my research was one called, “College Student Athletes and Social Media: The Psychological Impacts of Twitter Use” (2018). The authors of the study analyzed Twitter-using NCAA Division-1 student athletes at a large public midwestern university for the effects of Twitter on those athletes. The authors conducted a focus-group interview with seven of these student athletes. The authors asked why the athletes use Twitter, how they use Twitter, how Twitter affects them as athletes, and how Twitter affects their teams. The study found that the athletes used Twitter very intentionally and responsibly, and reaped many of the benefits it offered. It went on to say, however, that despite the “intentionality and care that participants used while interfacing with Twitter, they were not able to completely sidestep the effects of critical tweets.”
This directly supports one of the topics I am considering addressing with my project, prominent athletes and social media. There is a lot offered by this article, offering accounts from real Division-1 athletes on their social media experience. That said, there were many limitations to this research, and the authors made that clear in their article. While this will be a useful piece of research to integrate into my project, a lot more research is needed on this topic. This article focused on qualitative data from a small sample size from one specific school, and if I am to base my project on this topic, I will need more data, including qualitative data from Division-1 athletes from other schools, as well as professional athletes.
This week, I have not made significant progress on my project aside from continued deliberation on my topic idea, as I am still trying to narrow-down specifics.
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