title: The role of social context in shaping student-athlete opinions.
abstract: How do student-athletes form opinions? This is a particularly important question given ongoing debates about whether student-athletes should be paid and/or allowed to unionize. These debates concern the rights and benefits accrued directly to student-athletes, and thus, understanding their attitudes is of obvious import. Yet, virtually no recent work has delved into how student-athletes form opinions on these issues. We fill this gap with a theoretical framework that predicts changes in social context alter opinions. This leads to the hypothesis that opinions will change once a student-athlete completes his/her career and finds him/herself in a distinct social network. We test the prediction with a survey, implemented in 2012, of one of the most notable athletic conferences in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA): the Big Ten. We find that post-career student-athletes demonstrate higher levels of support for pay for play and unionization. Our results suggest that student-athletes' opinions seem to depend on their extant social contexts. While our data, from 2012, neither speak to current opinions - given the quickly evolving landscape of college athletics - nor demonstrate what reforms may be "best," they do accentuate the power of social context in shaping student-athletes' attitudes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States of America.
authors.forename: James N
authors.initials: JN
authors.lastname: Druckman
authors.affiliation: Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States of America.
authors.forename: Mauro
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gilli
authors.affiliation: Department of Political Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, United States of America.
authors.forename: Samara
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Klar
authors.affiliation: Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
authors.forename: Joshua
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Robison
mesh_terms: D056352:Athletes / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007750:Labor Unions; D008297:Male; D011639:Public Opinion; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D013177:Sports / Q000191:economics* / Q000523:psychology; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology*; D013850:Thinking; D055815:Young Adult