Two dozen articles, one landmark survey, and the data behind the country’s loudest sports arguments — from paying college athletes to transgender athlete rights.
Professor Chris Knoester leads the National Sports and Society Survey (NSASS), a landmark survey that measures sports involvement and sports-related attitudes over the life course. The NSASS offers evidence on how connections with sports evolve from childhood into adulthood, how sports attitudes develop, and how sports involvement is related to long-term well-being.
The NSASS was originally fielded in 2018–19. Recently, the team completed short pilot surveys with some of the original participants, and hundreds of new respondents, to prepare for follow-up data collections and updated analyses. Knoester has published two dozen articles from this dataset, working with a team of faculty, graduate, and undergraduate collaborators. A dozen undergraduate student theses have also used the data, and NSASS findings have been extensively covered by local, national, and global media.
As Research Chair for the Ohio State Sports and Society Initiative (SSI), Knoester bridges academic research and public conversation on headline issues such as paying college athletes, youth sports participation, transgender athlete rights, racial attitudes in sports fandom, and sports gambling. At a university that is number one in the nation in athletics, the connection between a top-ranked sociology department and a top-ranked athletics program is an intellectual opportunity that SSI and the NSASS are built to maximize.
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