Abstract
Parents of middle school–aged children face a true dilemma as they consider whether to allow their children to play tackle football. The sport is cited as one that fosters a number of intangible benefits but is increasingly mentioned as dangerous for youth participants. This study employed a sensemaking theory framework to explore the family, community, and media dynamics that influence how parents made sense of their football decisions. We interviewed 12 married couples about their decisions allowing their child to play middle school football. Results indicate parents were affected by family identities, community and social influences, and information sources in their football decisions. We developed a typology describing three parental approaches to the football decision: the football-first family, the safety-first family, and the laissez-faire family. We drew connections between family type, decision agency, and risk assessment for the pro-football decision. To conclude, we offer theoretical and practical implications related to this key parental decision.
In recent years, the American public has learned of the risks associated with tackle football through media stories of emerging medical research and anecdotal accounts of the suicides of former National Football League (NFL) players like Junior Seau. Medical examiners routinely find evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in deceased NFL players’ brains, consistent with damage caused by concussions (Pilon & Belson, 2013). CTE occurs as the result of multiple brain hits, the type football players are prone to absorb. While the subject of sports-related concussions and CTE increasingly garners attention at the national level, we know little about how football participation decisions are made at the local, familial level.
Parents and young athletes remain generally unaware about the causes and effects of sports-related head injuries (Manasse-Cohick & Shapley, 2014). In 2015, the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research reported 4.2 million tackle football participants in the United States each year (Mueller & Colgate, 2012), including about 1.1 million high school players and about 3.0 million youth football players. Youth football participation rates declined in recent years, but millions of children still play despite medical experts’ strong warnings that individuals under the age of 18 should not participate in tackle football (Findler, 2015; Omalu, 2017). Parents are faced with difficult decisions regarding their child’s football participation; they may have to negotiate complex medical information, warnings from experts, local community support for football, and their own child’s desires in making a decision that could impact their child’s short- and long-term health.
Sensemaking theory is a useful lens for exploring how parents understand decisions to allow their children to play tackle football. Through the act of sensemaking, individuals process and reconcile reality to decisions that have already been made (Weick, 1995). Individuals engage in sensemaking upon encountering equivocal, ambiguous, and incongruous events or stimuli that disrupt the present context. For example, news of Seau’s or other well-known football players’ suicides can act as “shocks to the system” (Dougherty & Drumheller, 2006, p. 223) for parents who allow their child to play youth tackle football. It would be useful to understand what factors parents rely on in making decisions about football participation.
The purpose of this study was to explore the family, community, and media dynamics that influence how parents make sense of decisions to allow children to play tackle football. Results of this study inform how parents comprehend decisions to permit children to play collision sports. Results will also provide knowledge for scholars, trainers, and athletic administrators to most accurately appeal to parents’ desires to make informed choices for their children by identifying the properties that hold most credibility.
Youth Tackle Football
Football is woven into the identity of millions of Americans; Morris (2004) suggested the sport is “everything that is right (or wrong) about American culture and society” (p. 1). When the decision is made to allow a child to play football, parents’ identities shift to incorporate the new reality of being a football parent. With over 4 million tackle football participants in the United States, education about associated risks, for example, head trauma, involved in playing the sport is of utmost importance. However, scholars (Cournoyer & Tripp, 2014; Register-Mihalik et al., 2013) have found football players and their parents unable to identify symptoms of concussions, including nausea or vomiting, neck pain, grogginess, personality change, and difficulty concentrating. If players do recognize symptoms, up to 50% of athletes do not report concussion symptoms (McCrea, Hammeke, Olsen, Leo, & Guskiewicz, 2004), suggesting a lack of awareness about the seriousness of these injuries.
A mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), or concussion, is the most common head injury in all athletes, particularly football players (Moser, 2007). About 300,000 patients are admitted to emergency departments each year with mTBIs according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Importantly, concussions and mTBIs have been linked to the development of CTE (Pilon & Belson, 2013). CTE is a neurological disorder that indicates damage to the brain. The deleterious effects of CTE can occur even when athletes wear helmets or other protective gear (Viano, Casson, & Pellman, 2007). Research indicates parents lack understanding about links between head injuries, CTE propensity, and long-term outcomes (Kroshus, Chrisman, & Rivara, 2017). Concussions affect both female and male sport participants (Sanderson, Weathers, Snedaker, & Gramlich, 2017), and mTBIs at an early age can cause negative effects on neurocognitive testing (Colvin et al., 2009).
Media Framing of Sports-Related Head Injuries
Frames of concussions in media shape conversations of safety, masculinity, and football at both the microlevel and macrolevel of communication (Cassilo & Sanderson, 2018). Frames influence perceptions by making certain features of a message more salient (Entman, 1993). Frames that receive repetition in media coverage are particularly influential (Billings & Eastman, 2003), creating a feedback loop among media outlets (Seltzer & Mitrook, 2009). Frames exert particular influence in public health contexts (Stefanik-Sidener, 2013), as health risks carry embedded uncertainty that increase reliance on outside sources to inform opinions. Analysis of concussion frames in media illustrates converging themes of health risk, parental choice, and social dynamics of football participation (Cassilo & Sanderson, 2018).
Media frames influence audience perceptions of masculinity and toughness in sports (Sanderson, Weathers, Grevious, Tehan, & Warren, 2016). Although hypermasculinity characterizes sports contexts (Richardson & McGlynn, 2011), cultures that applaud hegemonic masculinity may increase health risks of athletes (Cranmer & Sanderson, 2018; Sanderson et al., 2017). Analysis of media frames indicate outlets are beginning to shift emphasis away from masculine warrior discourse and toward promoting the long-term health of athletes (Anderson & Kian, 2012). Media frames influence parents’ assessments of risk and benefit for youth sport participation (Cassilo & Sanderson, 2018), affecting how they socialize their children into sport.
Sport Socialization
Parents play an active role in the socialization of children into sports (Holt, Tamminen, Black, Mandigo, & Fox, 2009). Family communication and social relationships are key to understanding how children become socialized into sports (Kassing et al., 2004). Although parents’ goals for sport participation may change over time, the desire to integrate cultural values is a leading reason why parents enroll children into team sports (Dunn, Kinney, & Hofferth, 2003). Children are likely to emulate parents’ attitudes toward sports (Dixon, Warner, & Bruening, 2008), particularly among middle school athletes (Fredericks & Eccles, 2005). However, teammates, coaches, and social dynamics also play a role (Cranmer, 2018). Parent–athlete communication occurs within both micro and macro contexts (Tamminen, Poucher, & Povilaitis, 2017) and impacts youth sports participation in sports such as football.
Thus, we need to know more about how families navigate positive and critical information about football, as well as social influences from their children, other families, and their communities, in making the important decision to allow their own child to participate. One avenue for this exploration is to examine how parents make sense of a decision already made to allow their child to play the sport. A plethora of researchers (Cournoyer & Tripp, 2014; Register-Mihalik et al., 2013) have examined player and parent education regarding symptoms and treatment of concussion in youth sports; the present study takes a different approach, focusing on sensemaking aspects of parents’ decisions to let children play tackle football.
Sensemaking Theory
Per Weick (1995), the concept of sensemaking is named aptly “because, literally, it means the making of sense” (p. 4). The theory is particularly useful for situations in which groups or individuals encounter disruptions, otherwise known as “input of new information,” to organizing processes (Vigsø & Odén, 2016, p. 72). Parents who are contemplating allowing their children to play tackle football have certainly witnessed disruptions in how risks associated with the sport are discussed. In the past few years, the media has surfaced accounts of CTE-associated risks of football, pending legislation that would eliminate tackle football for children younger than 12, and the aforementioned stories of former players’ suicides being linked to football (Schweizer, 2018). These types of stories are system disrupters; they represent gaps between current events and existing ways-of-knowing (Vigsø & Odén, 2016) and trigger sensemaking behaviors for individuals attempting to “structure the unknown” (Waterman, 1990, p. 4). Sensemaking behaviors include “framing, (or) the viewing of stimuli through a particular lens or framework” (Hamel, 2009, p. 237). While frames are fairly stable, they can change as new information is integrated with previous mental models (Vigsø & Odén, 2016). Thus, sensemaking theory provides scholars opportunities to understand what frames and factors influence group decisions. Weick (1995) describes seven properties of sensemaking, each of which may be useful for understanding how parents make sense of their football decisions.
First, sensemaking is retrospective in nature, which suggests people make sense of events after they happen. Sensemaking is also prospective, meaning we consistently refer back to existing frames in order to predict and understand future events (Weick, 1995). Second, sensemaking is ongoing; the history and context of a stimuli affect present and future interpretations of the stimuli in a given context (Dougherty & Smythe, 2004). Third, the property of extracted cues involves the selection of certain pieces of information attended to by individuals when constructing reality (Dougherty & Smythe, 2004). People tend to choose cues that are consistent with existing assumptions (Dougherty & Drumheller, 2006). Consequently, sensemaking allows people to return from an equivocal state to a more stable state of being.
Interwoven in individual, dyadic, and group sensemaking are the fourth and fifth properties, social and identity. Sensemaking is social, meaning an individual’s reality is influenced by the implied, actual, or imagined presence of others (Craig-Lees, 2001). Relatedly, identity is a core preoccupation in sensemaking and is formed by how individuals see themselves based on interactions with others. Dougherty and Smythe (2004) suggested sensemaking processes not only influence individuals’ identities but can also initiate or enforce cultural identity for a larger group. The sixth property, enactment, suggests people not only react to the environment, but they also are active agents in producing elements of the environment (Weick, 1995). Finally, the act of sensemaking is based on plausibility rather than verifiable accuracy. As long as understanding of a situation seems reasonable within a given context, it is immaterial whether it is factually correct.
In this exploratory study, parents were asked to look back on decisions made (retrospective) to reconcile uncertain information (equivocality) and pieces of information they chose to pay attention to (extracted cues) when discussing it with family and friends (social) and likening those cues to their personal beliefs (identity). The practicality of sensemaking theory as a guiding framework is exemplified by the difficulty involved in witnessing decisions as they are made between the parents in real time. Weick (1995) asserts the usefulness of sensemaking in that when people make decisions, they first act on a decision they have made and then analyze that decision later, which is what the present study addresses. In order to understand how parents make sense of known risky behavior in the form of tackle football and to expand sensemaking theory to additional research contexts, we aim to answer the research question as presented.
Method
This study was approved by the university’s internal review board. All participants signed an informed consent form before interviews proceeded. Participant, community, school names, and other identifying information were changed for this report.
Recruitment and Participants
Creswell (2009) stated that purposeful sampling is the backbone of qualitative research because the researcher is permitted to hand pick participants in order to best understand the problem and research question. The goal of the study was to understand parents’ sensemaking about their decisions to allow their child to play youth tackle football. Thus, our selection criteria for participants were that they were married, or cohabitating, couples who had at least one child playing tackle football at the middle school level. We spoke to personal acquaintances who fit these criteria to request they take part in the study and also posted a call for participants on the social media website Facebook to recruit families. In addition, we employed snowball sampling to add to our field of participants. Snowball sampling employs participants to help recruit other individuals by speaking to family members, coworkers, friends, and other people, who fit the study’s parameters, about participating in the research (Tracy, 2013).
Through these methods of recruitment, we secured 24 participants in the form of 12 married couples. Participants, all of whom lived in Texas, included 12 males and 12 females; their ages ranged from 28 to 51 years (M = 42.9) for females and 40 to 56 years (M = 45.1) for males. Twenty-two interviewees identified as White/Caucasian and two participants identified as Black/African American. All had at least one child playing middle school tackle football at the time of the study.
Procedure
We interviewed both parents together, which encouraged couples to reconstruct how the family had made decisions to allow their child to play tackle football (Giannini, 2011). Seven interviews were conducted in person, while five were phone interviews. Interviews were audio recorded and followed a semistructured, open-ended format. The interview protocol was formulated to address parents’ decision-making process in allowing their child to play football. We asked questions about the parents’ athletic backgrounds, anticipated risks and benefits of playing football, perceptions of CTE and concussions, and the media’s influence with regard to youth football. Sample questions included “what were the benefits you felt your son could gain by playing football,” “have you heard news about CTE,” and “do you think the media fairly portrays the pros and cons of youth football?” We also probed for additional information as topics emerged; for example, the issue of “community influence,” which frequently surfaced, was explored further within several interviews. This approach allowed participants to speak freely about past decisions and make sense of those decisions in real time (Tracy, 2013). Interviews lasted between 45 min and 90 min (M = 50 min). Interviews were transcribed by a professional transcription company, producing 149 pages of single-spaced data.
Data Analysis
Interviews continued until data produced fewer and fewer unique results, indicating we were approaching theoretical saturation (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). We analyzed the data collected through a constant comparative method which was similar to a grounded theory approach. More specifically, we performed an iterative analysis, which combines analyzing emergent data with an existing theoretical framework (Tracy, 2013), particularly sensemaking theory. This approach was most appropriate because it allowed us to give preference to the meaning of the data as it emerged (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002). The data analysis method was a three-step process which involved open coding, axial coding, and dimensionalization. First, we read through the entire transcription once to get a feel for interviews and begin making theoretical memos for the data (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002).
During the second read through, we began the process of open coding of the transcriptions. We proceeded through the data line by line, coding each incident that resonated with parents’ sensemaking about their decisions to allow their children to play tackle football. We created categories for incidents; we then compared subsequent incidents and either (a) placed them into conceptually similar categories or (b) created a new category when appropriate (Charmaz, 2006). The open coding process led to the creation of 92 categories. Categories ranged from those that captured how parents rationalized risks, for example, “downplaying injuries,” related to the benefits of football, for example, “benefit persistence,” and described the role of football in their lives, for example, “dad played football.”
Next, we performed axial coding which is a process of integrating categories/codes (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002). Axial coding involved systematically grouping similar categories under themes that synthesized the individual categories (Tracy, 2013). In the first stage of axial coding, five categories were discarded, two duplicate codes were combined, and one code was redistributed to similar codes. In the second stage of axial coding, we looked at the remaining codes independently to identify a theoretical theme to categorize the code. While processing the individual codes, we considered the utility of developing a new theme or adding the code to an existing theme. Axial coding allowed us to develop integrated sets of topics from the original set of codes (Banks, Louie, & Einerson, 2000). At the conclusion of this process, we identified eight themes and subthemes that captured common meanings in the emergent codes. These themes became the basis of theoretical constructs specific to this study.
Finally, we took the theoretical themes and found commonality between them in a process called dimensionalization (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002). Dimensionalization or “selective coding” allows researchers to identify core categories, extract the storyline, and polish and verify interpretations of the data (Banks et al., 2000). Through this process, two overarching constructs emerged: family identity and external influencers. As a verification step (Creswell, 2009), we presented our findings to two of the sets of parents who had participated in the study. Both agreed the findings accurately captured their experiences around deciding that their middle school–aged children could play tackle football.
Findings
In this study, we investigated family, media, and community dynamics that influenced parents’ decisions to allow their middle school children to play tackle football. Next, we present two themes that addressed our research question: family identity and external influencers.
Family Identity
Data analysis revealed family identity was critical in parents’ sensemaking of their football decisions. For this study, we leaned on Wagner, Kunkel, and Compton’s (2016) conceptualization of family identity as a families’ group concept as it is constructed and negotiated through relational and cultural influences. Individuals come to know themselves based upon their interactions with others (Weick, 1995); the way people interact about a particular topic influences how they understand themselves (Dougherty & Smythe, 2004). We recognized that how the family made sense of their choice revealed how the family perceived themselves as a collective. Specifically, we noted three types of families: football-first family, safety-first family, and laissez-faire family (see Table 1 for a description of each type). These respective identities seemed to influence how the family perceived football, whether and how they rationalized their decision, how they assessed risk, and to some extent, who had agency over the football decision.
Typology of Parents.
Football-first family
The football-first family included four sets of parents who were identified by statements of believing that their child should be playing football or by stating that it was never a question as to whether or not their child would play. For these families, the sport of football was central to their identities and consumed their conversations, time, and resources. Interestingly, in several football-first families, the parents made the decision for the child to play over their child’s disinterest in the sport. Amelia and Ethan exemplified this type of parent; they spoke about the decision to have their children play football and reflected on the fact that the children simply did not have a choice in this deliberation. It was interesting to note the disagreement in remembering this decision that occurred between Amelia and Ethan. Amelia also oscillated between saying their sons were forced to play and they wanted to play. Amelia and Ethan’s statements reflected both parental agency and a football-first mentality:
…they don’t know anything else. They just know football. They know every sport, but we didn’t give them a choice. We made them do it. It helps build character, it helps them grow up and believe in their selves. We made them play. But they wanted to play.
I wouldn’t say we made them play. Growing up…because I’ve been a coach for so long and so the boys, they have been around football, basketball, they’ve been around it.
Yeah, they were…excited to play.
Interestingly, Ethan is a football coach and Amelia’s father was a long-time high school football coach in Texas. Amelia went on to say, I was named after a football player. My daddy played football. I was at a football game when I was 10 days old, watching my dad play. He played college football. My Dad was a coach my whole life. Then I married a coach…I mean, I can actually say that…little league football, we’ve probably done it since…my son was…seven or eight years old.
Several football-first families retained agency over their child’s football participation. For example, Mila said, “(the twins) didn’t want to play because they want to concentrate on basketball.…I made them play football this year.” Most parents in this category assumed agency over their children’s decisions to play middle school tackle football and did so without hesitation. Further, they were less likely to emphasize risks associated with the sport when speaking with their children. For example, Charlotte said, “I try not to put fear in them.…it somewhat concerns me that…in the school, they really do.…I was okay with (their football participation). It wasn’t a discussion for us, we just said ‘okay.’”
Focusing primarily on the benefits of football over the sport’s risks was another characteristic widely shared by the football-first families. While these families did recognize risks associated with the sport, they consistently emphasized the benefits of football citing how the sport developed leadership ability and instilled toughness, discipline, persistence, camaraderie, and teamwork. Parent Jacob used the following narrative to emphasize how football helped develop his own persistence. He said: I can specifically remember days, when I played in high school, where I just thought I was done. I had nothing more left in the tank, and I remember coaches saying, “Look, you don’t know your limits yet.” And I believe you do find more limits, and more limits, than…when it’s fourth quarter, it’s two minutes to go. You’re tired, you’re beaten down, and you suck it up, and you plow through.
Safety-first family
The safety-first family describes five sets of parents who, unlike the football-first group, were very concerned about allowing their child to play football. These families’ identities appeared to be centered on safety and careful deliberation when they were expected to make decisions involving risks and their children. Emma and Logan exemplified the safety-first family type; the pro-football decision tormented them. Emma recounted Logan viewing a sports news program profiling the dangers of the sport and adamantly telling her their sons would not play football in middle school. Despite this defiant tone, they ultimately turned the decision over to their then eighth-grade son, Griffin. Emma said: …Logan told (Griffin), “In ninth grade, don’t even ask me. You’re not playing. I’m putting my foot down, I forbid you.” I will never forget it…(Griffin) came in your office and was like, “Dad this is my life and this is what I want to do.” I walked into Logan’s office and I said, “We’re going to have to pray a lot more and you’re going to have to let him do it. He’s going to have to make his own mistakes and his own decisions. If not, he will hate you for never letting him try.” Logan was like, “Okay. If you end up in a wheelchair, you realize you’re going to look at me and mom’s face every day when we change your diapers.” And he was like, “I understand.” He was like, “Do you really understand? You could have spinal damage.” Griffin was like, “Yes sir.” And he was like, “Okay.”
Likely due to their focus on their child’s safety, and knowing they were signing them up for a risky sport, the safety-first families were more likely to rationalize their decisions. We contend their decisions contradicted their safety-first identities, leading to rationalizing. A prime rationalization was that a child could get hurt in any sport not just football. Parent Aiden said: I think the concussion stuff also applies…(to any sport). You think about baseball. You get hit in the head by a ball. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a helmet on…that doesn’t mean you’re not going to get a concussion. Swimming, backstroke, you slam your head into the wall. You can get a concussion from that. You can get a concussion in track. …the last two years, Oliver has taken him and we have bought his helmet. The middle school’s helmets…are good, but Oliver wanted to make sure we had the proper fit, the right…We were gonna spend the extra money-…to get…and that’s what I told him, “I don’t care what you spend on a helmet. Get him a helmet that’s gonna protect him.”
While the safety-first families allowed their child to play middle school football, they universally expressed apprehension over their child playing high school football. Their concerns over safety at higher levels of football led them to suggest their son’s participation in high school was “iffy.” Further, their safety-first identity potentially led them to rationalize decisions in support of football.
Laissez-faire family
Unlike the other types of parents who took the pro-football decision seriously, the laissez-faire type generally possessed a nonchalant attitude about their child’s involvement. For the three families of this type, their child’s involvement in the sport was a relatively small part of their lives. They had some concerns about the sport’s safety but were primarily happy their child enjoyed the sport. They neither obsessed over the decision nor considered it integral to who they were.
A distinguishing characteristic of the laissez-faire families is they seemed to give over decision-making power to their child to make the football decision. They were not involved in the decision to allow their child to play middle school football because they “did not care either way.” Isabella spoke about leaving the decision entirely up to their son. She said of the decision, “We didn’t have anything to do with it. We didn’t care either way. We were supportive, but whatever he was gonna do is okay with us.” When discussing whether their child would continue to play tackle football at the high school level, the laissez-faire parents suggested it would depend on what the child desired. When asked about her son’s future football participation, parent Aria said, “…to answer the question, I have no idea…if you ask me if he’ll play or not play, I couldn’t (answer). I wouldn’t bet either way.”
While the other types of parents generally conducted some sort of cost–benefit analysis as part of their decisions, the laissez-faire families were less analytical. Their concerns about safety were minimal compared to the safety-first type and they trusted their school’s coaching staff to teach safe ways of tackling and blocking. For example, Isabella said, “I know the (CTE and concussion) studies, and I appreciate the concerns, but I’m also excited because I feel like (our school) and most football, and youth football, in general, is on top of best practice for tackling.” Overall, the laissez-faire families tended to be pretty well informed about the risks associated with football. However, they weighed their child’s interests and desires as most important. Football was something they had assimilated into their lives but not something that defined who they were; as long as their child was happy playing football, they were supportive.
External Influencers
The second theme, external influencers, referred to the influences beyond their homes that appeared to infiltrate parents’ decisions to allow their child to play middle school football. As parents made sense of their football decisions, they called upon these as factors they had to navigate. Three subthemes were identified as influencing or shaping parents’ decisions: community influences, social influences, and information sources.
Community influences
Per Weick (1995), “people simultaneously try to shape and react to the environments they face. They take the cue for their identity from the conduct of others, but they make an active effort to influence this conduct to begin with” (p. 23). In the present study, participants were obviously influenced by the football-intensive environments in which they were situated. Interestingly, they were also involved in perpetuating those environments regardless of their family identity. Throughout interviews, they alluded to “professionalization” of youth football and implicit community pressure as influencing their decisions.
Liam and Olivia spoke to cultural influence in their community, explaining the setup of their local high school’s stadium as a “professional setup” and that the football games were a “big social event.” They said:
The revenue that’s generated from this I’m sure it’s huge but again it’s your kids. There’s a group of kids that attend these games, the parents attend it. To be quite honest the first time I went to a game, it was like a professional set up.
It’s a social event too. It’s a Friday night to go watch the Trojan game, it’s very much of a social event for the kids. The kids just go play and want to be there because all their friends are there and the parents are there just hanging out and watching the game. If you want season tickets then you have to camp out overnight to get them. It’s a community event.
While parents reacted to their football communities, they also enacted this football-intensive culture. Safety-first parent Emma, who was concerned about her son playing the sport, commented, “We love (high school football games). We’ve been buying season tickets…because we love to watch everybody else’s kids play. We just don’t really prefer to watch ours play.” Other parents talked about buying season tickets because of the “fun” and “cool” experience of game nights, getting “wrapped up” in the games, and of watching the “nightly news coverage” of their teams during the season.
Similarly, some parents spoke to the indoctrination of young children in their community saying that the high school football players visited the elementary schools, read to the kindergarteners, and ask them if they were “coming to the football game?” Olivia said: I said it was a cult…so in elementary (school), the varsity football players would come every Friday before a game and be reading pals and they would also be telling the kids, “you coming to the game tonight? You going to come and watch me play?” And just revving them up to just make sure they were into it. So even if you didn’t really like football and didn’t want to follow it then on Friday here comes your reading pal.
Social influences
Related to cultural influence was social influence, conceptualized as an individual changing or accommodating his or her beliefs or attitudes to maintain or establish a relationship with others (Cho, 2011). While community influence speaks to macrolevel pressures, for example, professionalization of high school football, social influence refers to interpersonal influence from neighbors and friends. Weick (1995) recognizes that sensemaking is a social experience, one that is influenced by “talk, discourse, and conversation” (p. 45). All three types of parents suggested their child was influenced to play football by their peers in order to maintain friendships with them. For example, James said, “…it was a kid from school (that asked Glenn to play football). (He) knew (Glenn) was a good athlete and asked him if he was interested in playing. So, we asked Glenn and he said ‘yes.’” Olivia told a similar story, saying, “I think (Mark) had interest because every other kid in the grade, all of the boys, played football and want to play football.” Isabella said her son was also influenced to play by his friends and added a couple of additional factors as influencers. She said, “I think it was mostly his friends, and I think he thought it was cool, and he played (video game) Madden (football), and he loves fantasy football.” Throughout the participants’ comments, it was common for friends of both the child and the parents to influence the football decision.
Information sources
Information sources refer to individuals or resources recognized by parents as influential in their decisions to allow their children to play football. In sensemaking parlance, these sources provided “extracted cues” or those entities which people “noticed as worthy of attention” (Dougherty & Drumheller, 2006, p. 217) as they made sense of their football decisions. Primary information sources included the school’s coaches, the media, and perceived experts (e.g., doctors, the school).
Coaches
Of three information sources, families mentioned coaches as swaying their decisions most often. In Texas middle schools, there are generally six to eight coaches on staff for athletics. All of the coaches function, primarily, as football coaches and then are assigned another sport for the remainder of the year. Any child who signs up for middle school athletics is exposed to the football coaching staff on a daily basis. Parents’ mentioned coaches’ influence in several ways including the coach outright recruiting their sons, trusting the coach to not put their child in a dangerous situation, and hearing that the coaches and program are reputable.
One of the football families talked about a phone call from their middle school coach recruiting their sons. Alex said he was not planning on having their boys play middle school football because they were already involved in two sports and the boys did not want to play another sport. However, after speaking with the boy’s coach, he signed them up. He said: I made them play football this year because their coach gave me a call. That he really needed the boys to play and he would really like them to play…They kind of acted like babies and said they didn’t want to play. One ended up being the quarterback and the other one is the receiver.
Still, some parents, particularly the safety-first families, perceived the coaches as submitting children to too much pressure to stay in the sport. Parent Emma commented, “Quitting football is an ordeal at the high school. You can’t just quit football. (The coaches) give you a major guilt trip. Griffin said they were like ‘Are you scared? Are you scared?'” Research indicates policies enacted to reduce football’s physicality may be characterized by opponents as threats to the inherent masculinity of the sport (Cranmer & Sanderson, 2018). Our results suggest this sort of discourse also occurs at the interpersonal level when coaches question the manhood of a young athlete who desires to quit football. Overall, it was obvious that coaches held sway over both children’s and parents’ interest in middle school football; while most families reported they were comfortable with this interest in their child, other felt the pressure was too strong.
Media
The media was recognized as a source of information about CTE and other football-related risks by most parents in the study. Parents cited sports network ESPN, the movie Concussion, the “media,” and the NFL Network as key information sources about CTE and other risks associated with football. Overall, parents seemed well-versed about these issues through media exposure, supporting research finding the media seems to be moving toward a focus on player safety over portrayals of hypermasculinity in sport (Anderson & Kian, 2012). The safety-first parents were particularly likely to report they knew of these risks via the media and some parents reported active searches for information. Elijah said, “you hear stuff on the radio about it. I’ve done some Googling and read some articles on it. That’s how I got the information about that the more concussions you get, the more likely it is for the next concussion.” Still, parents’ examples in this regard overwhelmingly related to collegiate and professional football players. While there is increasing research about these higher levels, there is little medical information regarding the youngest football players, which might offer a rationalization for parents’ pro-football decisions.
When Mia was asked if she had heard anything about youth football in the media, she responded that what she had learned about football applied to older players. She said: No, not a whole lot.…Of course, you see a lot more [in the media] with the older ones, and I’m thinking it’s probably because they’re the ones that are suffering consequences from previous play and stuff like that. I’ve read little bits like through the NFL pieces and different things like that. They’re looking at helmet technology and things like that.
Expert sources
The final information source parents relied on was “expert sources” in the form of medical doctors or the administration at the child’s school. Both were considered legitimate sources but did provide some contradictory information. Liam reported his doctor friends discouraged youth football participation. He said, “…a couple of friends that were doctors were like ‘there’s no way I’d let my kid play this kind of sport. It’s dangerous, it’s unsafe, it’s not right at that kind of age.'” On the other hand, Ava, a mom from a hesitant family, said that she was hoping their son would not like football. However, because the doctor said he could play, they made the decision to let him.
School’s administrators were another key source of information, one that generally assuaged parents’ concerns about football. Parent Harper spoke about their school’s role as an information source to the family with regard to football participation stating: During the parent meeting they definitely talked about (concussions). They did all of the fitting for shoulder pads and helmets and mouth guards. I think they did a really good job of teaching the boys about their equipment, what they needed to do to be responsible for their equipment, why it was important for it to fit certain ways. I felt like John learned more during that little seventh grade bit that he even learned before because we took that or his coaches did. We’ve been really happy with the way that the Thomas Middle School has (educated us).
Discussion
Today, youth football is “under attack”; medical experts, community leaders, and current and former NFL players offer inconsistent messages to parents about the safety of the game (Armstrong, 2017). Parents are expected to navigate system-disrupting and equivocal messages as they decide whether to allow their children to play the sport. The more we know about their decision-making processes, the better able policy makers, administrators, and doctors will be to offer sound, practical advice to parents. Consistent with Weick’s sensemaking theory, the responses analyzed in this study suggest parents retrospectively make sense of their football decisions in ways that emphasize identity, extracted cues, and social influence. Further, these families are both influenced by and participate in enacting a football-intensive community identity. Next, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the study.
Theoretical Implications
Our examination of parents’ pro-football decisions through a sensemaking framework illuminated that these decisions were not purely rational but rather are influenced by a confluence of internal and external influences. Weick (1995) draws from Starbuck and Milliken (1988) when asserting “sensemaking involves placing stimuli into some kind of framework” (p. 4). In the present study, the families’ identities acted as frameworks as they made sense of their football decisions. The influence of family identity cannot be understated considering sport socialization research suggests children follow their parents’ attitudes toward sport (Dixon et al., 2008). For the football-first families, signing up their children for the sport made sense. Football was integral to the family’s identity; the narratives they told about their involvement in the sport, which included how playing football had crafted their own character, aligned with the assuredness of their pro-football decision. While several mentioned concerns about the game’s safety, their general posture was to focus on benefits of the sport. The safety-first parents viewed the football decision through safety and risk frames. Their decision to allow their children to play football was not an easy one. Some struggled mightily with the decision and all talked up the risks associated with the sport. In essence, their identities became resources for which they could rationalize their decisions, a by-product of the sensemaking process (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005). Considering they permitted their sons to play football, a decision which contradicted “who they were,” it is no surprise this group engaged in a great deal of rationalization. Finally, the laissez-faire parents seemed to focus mostly on what their children wanted to do with regard to playing football. Like the football-first parents, they did recognize some risks associated with the sport, but they did not appear overly concerned about their sons' involvement. Further, football was not central to these parents’ lives. While they enjoyed watching the sport, none of these parents had played beyond middle school football.
It is understandable that the football-first and laissez-faire families signed up their children to play football. However, the safety-first parents seem to contradict their identities with their football affirmative decisions. It seems plausible that community identity and social influence were critical factors informing decisions for these parents, in particular, and all parents, generally. Dougherty and Smythe (2004) articulated the role of sensemaking in the creation and sustenance of organizational culture, a proposition we argue extends to the community level. Scholars argue we understand our communities as imagined objects built upon narrative and myth (Giuffre, 2015), a perspective which resonates with the present study. All of the participants, even those most reluctant to allow their children to play tackle football, lived in, and enacted, football-intensive communities. The sport was characterized as an important “social event” for the community; participants discussed the excitement and pageantry of game night and recognized their state provided the setting for the popular high school drama Friday Night Lights. It seems reasonable the community has produced an ideology that fosters sentiments and decisions in favor of football. This community environment was no doubt intertwined with social influence from their own friends and their children’s friends that parents perceived. Considering sensemaking is a social process and “conduct is contingent on the conduct of others” (Weick, 1995, p. 39), it is not surprising that parents are prone to acquiesce to their child’s desires to play football even when they are concerned about risky aspects of the sport. This environment might problematize some parents’ critical decision-making relevant to football.
Weick (1995) suggests we “pay close attention to ways people notice, extract cues, and embellish that which they extract” (p. 49). A key form of extracted cue in the present study was information provided by relevant sources including coaches, the media, doctors, and school administrations. When faced with contradictory information, as appeared to be the case for our participants, people tend to extract cues aligned with preexisting assumptions and which conform to the social context (Weick, 1995). Our participants either selectively emphasized information that conformed to their football decisions or engaged in deselection of cues (Dougherty & Drumheller, 2006) when information contradicted their decisions. Interestingly, parents cited coaches and their children’s schools as key sources of pro-football information. Coaches were very present at their children’s schools and actively recruited students to play football. Despite having a vested interest in staffing their teams, parents never discussed this practice as a conflict of interest as it related to their son’s health. Schools were also perceived as important information sources which provided an air of legitimacy in discussing practices to make football safer. Parents also recognized the media as an important source of information about CTE and concussions, one that prompted many of them to conduct their own searches for information. Still, parents emphasized that the media’s focus on CTE was generally aimed at higher levels of football than their child’s. By placing this information in a known frame (Dougherty & Smythe, 2004)—the long odds their son would play in the NFL—parents were able to bypass this information. Some parents also deselected cues from doctors advising that children should not play football. These parents tended to rationalize their decision by suggesting children can get hurt in other sports and football at lower levels is safe. Doctors’ advice was “explained away to preserve the frame” (Vigsø & Odén, 2016).
It is worth mentioning that while sensemaking is retrospective, it is also prospective. In other words, how individuals make sense of something retrospectively affects future sensemaking (Dougherty & Drumheller, 2006; Weick, 1995). This sensemaking principle suggests the parents in the present study, particularly the football-first and laissez-faire types, will be more likely to allow their child to continue to play tackle football as that was their framework for their initial decisions. However, if new information emerges placing youth football in a particular risky light, parents will be forced to make sense of additional, equivocal informational inputs.
Practical Implications
Based upon results of this study, we advocate schools and coaches engage in significant choice when discussing football with parents. Significant choice suggests “there exists an ethical obligation for those in positions of influence to provide the information to their constituencies that is necessary for making well-reasoned decisions” (Ulmer & Sellnow, 1997, p. 217). Further, these organizations need to present all sides of an issue for stakeholders’ decision-making. Our study revealed coaches and schools, primary information sources, generally painted football in a favorable light. There was zero evidence coaches or schools openly discussed CTE and its links to tackle football. In addition to the numerous benefits of playing football, schools should inform parents about existent research linking football and CTE at higher levels of play.
The results of this study can also contribute to risk communication designed for different types of parents. To communicate risks, it is important to recognize families possess different football identities. Strong in-group identities influence how people perceive and use risk information (Frank, Eakin, & López-Carr, 2011). As message frames influence perceptions of health risks and support for policy changes (McGlynn & McGlone, 2018), it becomes important to tailor risk communication using verbiage that appeals to parental norms (Miller-Day & Kam, 2010). Based on results of this study, risk communication must accommodate the norms of families who identify strongly with football, those who are cautious about their children engaging in risks, and those who take more of a carefree attitude toward the sport.
Finally, it is obvious that football is still a valued sport in many communities, one that fosters school pride and spirit. Thus, the sport should continue to innovate in order to reduce associated risks. Participants genuinely desired a safer sport. Auerbach (2018) reported that one way to make the game safer is to not allow any lineman to crouch on the line, taking the players’ head out of the direct line of contact. While this would represent a landmark change to the sport and reduce a significant percentage of head-to-head collisions, there is little guarantee it will substantially reduce propensity of CTE in the sport.
Limitations and Directions for Future Research
Findings of this study should be considered in light of several limitations. First, parents from just two geographical locations, north Texas and southeast Texas, were interviewed. Future research should cast a wider geographic net, touching regions that are not as football intensive, such as Maine where football participation has dropped significantly in recent years (Clark, 2017). It would be valuable to investigate what factors are associated with this decline. Second, the present study was limited to those parents who had assented to their children playing football. It would be worthwhile to survey parents who refused to allow their children to play football to determine what factors influenced their decisions. This would allow a point of comparison between the two groups. Future studies should include more participants to capture diversity within the participant pool, for example, families who perceive they are dependent on football scholarships as the means for their child to attend college. Finally, we interviewed parents simultaneously, raising the possibility that parents may have produced different responses were they interviewed individually. Individual interviews might allow researchers to tease out differences based upon gender. Our study found interesting examples that violated gendered expectations, for example, mothers very supportive of football participation, that would be worth exploring in more detail. Future research should incorporate one-on-one interviews that allow for greater divergence of opinion than couple interviews.
Conclusion
Parents of middle school–aged children face a true dilemma as they consider whether to allow their children to play tackle football. The sport is routinely cited as one that fosters a number of intangible benefits including critical decision-making, teamwork, and character building (Gilbert & Johnson, 2011) but is increasingly mentioned as a sport dangerous for youth participants (Findler, 2015). A broadcast on Sports Radio 1310 The Ticket, a Dallas-based sports radio talk show, from March 8, 2018, reported that the prospect of football participation is starting to divide families, creating strains in parent-to-parent and parent-to-child relationships (Dunham, Miller, & Keith, 2018). While none of the families in our study reported devolving into destructive conflict, it was apparent that many struggled mightily with allowing their child to play tackle football. It is our hope the present study fosters scholarly interest in understanding the family and community dynamics associated with risk decisions and tackle football participation.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.