Factors Driving School Spirit

College athletics have long served as an outlet through which university students across the country demonstrate their school spirit. Due to the direct relation between school spirit and the financial status of collegiate athletic programs, Patrick Quinn examined the driving forces behind school spirit by distributing an online survey to a sample of 45 undergraduate students at the University of Maryland and content analysis of university attendance rates and ticket sales.

The results of Quinn’s study suggest that several factors drive school spirit: whether or not the participant has a personal tie to a Maryland athlete, the participant’s geographical tie to Maryland athletics, the participant’s knowledge level of Maryland athletics, the participant’s history of athletic participation, the participant’s sense of belonging, success level of athletic team, non-live attendance at events effects, news following of Maryland athletics level, social media activity.

Most notably, this study suggests that students who played a sport in high school tend to have more school spirit than those who did not. Results also suggest that students who have knowledge of Maryland athletics and watch Maryland athletics on television or online have more school spirit.

“People who go to Maryland athletic events for social reasons and who use social media to follow Maryland sports also tend to have higher school spirit,” Quinn said.

Quinn said that he was very surprised to find that students who use social media tend to have more school spirit. “It is not something concrete to judge school spirit but it was definitely interesting to see the extent to which students talk about Maryland sports without actually watching the game or being in attendance,” he said.

Students who grew up in Maryland also tend to have more school spirit according to the study. “College sports are something that people are raised on,” Quinn said.

Quinn’s study also indicated that the success of the university’s sports teams did not impact the level of a student’s school spirit. “This result was very interesting because the media tends to blame a team’s on-field performance for low ticket sales and poor attendance,” he said.

Due to the subjective nature of measuring school spirit, Quinn said that the most difficult part of conducting this study was determining which factors he would observe.

“I already knew that one single factor does not drive school spirit but I found it very difficult to determine how to weigh each factor and how to pin point which factors were most important,” he said.

Story #1 College Life Study: Observing Patterns in Collegiate Drug Use

Zack Cohen

College Life Study

For many students, college has become a time during which substance use is highly prevalent, according to one study. In an effort to understand the drug use patterns among college students The College Life Study took a unique look at the prevalence of collegiate substance use and its long-term effects.

“Substance abuse in college is not just a right of passage or something we should accept as normal,” said the College Life Study project director Kimberly Caldeira. “We think that we can do better than that as a society.”

The College Life Study was divided up into several subsections, each observing the results and habits related to the use of different substances throughout a subject’s first three years in college.

“There have been very few longitudinal studies on college students over the years,” said Caldeira, “most studies of drug use had focused on high risk populations like adolescents in disadvantaged urban settings so there was very little information on the higher achieving kind of population like college students.”

One area of research that was specifically observed was the amount of college kids that have substance use problems and to what extent these individuals sought professional help. Caldeira and her colleagues at the University of Maryland used personal interviews to assess a sample of 946 students over a three-year period.

“The interview face-to-face contact just made the process more personal and kept the participants motivated to stay with us over time,” said Caldeira. “The interview allowed us to get more detailed information and gave us the opportunity to engage the participants in more of a dialogue.”

Using standardized questionnaires and criteria set by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV, the researchers found that 47 percent of all third year students used alcohol and/or marijuana with such a high frequency that they qualified as having a substance use disorder at one point in their college career.

The table below illustrates the way in which researchers qualified each subject’s level of substance use.

Table 1

Comparison of baseline characteristics of included and excluded participants.

	Included (n=946)		Excluded (n=307)
	% (n)	Mean (SD)	% (n)	Mean (SD)
Sex (% male)	46.0 (435)		56.4 (173)*
Race (% White)	71.2 (674)		68.7 (211)
Alcohol use characteristics a
DSM-IV Status b
Dependence	16.1 (140)		15.3 (42)
Abuse	12.2 (106)		16.1 (44)
Diagnostic orphan c	40.5 (351)		39.1 (107)
Non-problematic	31.1 (270)		29.6 (81)
Typical number of drinks/drinking day		4.8 (2.6)		5.2 (3.0)*
Past-year frequency of drinking		50.8 (48.1)		58.3 (54.7)*
Age first drank alcohol		14.7 (2.3)		14.6 (2.5)
Marijuana use characteristics d
DSM-IV Status b
Dependence	9.2 (53)		12.6 (22)
Abuse	15.6 (90)		9.2 (16)
Diagnostic orphan c	12.5 (72)		15.5 (27)
Non-problematic	62.8 (363)		62.6 (109)
Past-year frequency of use		35.2 (64.2)		47.5 (81.1)*
Age first used marijuana		16.0 (1.5)		15.9 (1.7

Despite the high rates of problematic heavy drinking and drug use, an important contribution of this study is the finding that only four percent of the sampled college students who qualified as having a substance use disorder perceived a need for help with their substance use problems.Basically, most of the students who had substance use problems did not even recognize the fact that they had a problem.

The Graph below illustrates how many students fall into the each level of alcohol use.

“What these findings tell us is that we need to do more research on methods for intervening with students who have an emerging alcohol problem and look into what kinds of screening methods health providers and campus administrators can utilize to help,” said Caldeira.

Caldeira added that future researchers should use the data collected in the College Life Study related to social pressures for insight into some potential solutions to help identify the students who have a serious substance use problems.

The study found that help-seeking amongst substance use disorder cases was rare overall, but was significantly elevated amongst individuals who perceived a need to seek help or experienced social pressures from parents, friends, or another person. These findings highlight the opportunity for early intervention and tell us that an increase in social pressure could help more students realize the extent of their substance use.

Blog Introduction

It is common knowledge that the world of professional journalism is drastically changing before our very eyes. The days of walking to the end of your drive way to pick up your newspaper are quickly being replaced by a new era of smart phones and apps. As news media become more digital and interactive, it is more important that ever for journalists to understand what the audience wants from their news coverage and what is the best way of giving it to them while utilizing the technology at our disposal.

According to a PEW study, 92 percent of Americans get their daily news from multiple platforms. The Internet is the third most popular platform behind local and national television news. I want to understand how the readers expectations of online content differs from that of print or televised content? Will the use of multiple platforms result in a more informed audience or an audience who is only willing to read stories that appeal to their personalized interests? What makes a link more clickable (wording of caption, thumbnail image, ect...)?

I also have a particular interest in gaining a better understanding of how social media will be fully integrated into the evolving journalism environment. How does the average reader use social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to consume content and what makes them want to share that content with their friends? According to the PEW study, people use their social networks and social networking technology to filter, assess, and react to news while using traditional email and other tools to swap news stories and comment on them.