Target Audience: Middle School Students

Concept: I met with middle schoolers to discuss their favorite athletes and where their perceptions of these athletes come from. I choose middle schoolers because they are very impressionable as well as being digital natives. The majority of their opinions come from what the see online or what their peers tell them. 

Question: Do their perceptions of the athletes they follow come from their own believes or opinions, or is it planted in their minds by the media and how these athletes are portrayed?

Execution: I met with a couple different classes (grades 6th and 7th) and each student was given the opportunity to share their favorite athlete by writing it on a canvas in black. Then after everyone shared their athlete role models every had the opportunity to write in color and give their opinions about all the athletes being displayed. Now given that these are middles schoolers most of the comments are exactly as you would expect. There weren't too many in depth thoughts but with their responses it could be distinguished the positive and negative connotations of each athlete. Because the students were so passionate about the subject, the usable research that I collected came from conversations I had with them.

Result: As you may have guess pre-teens are heavily opinionated and ready to argue while being closed minded. This made for some enjoyable interactions and games to be played on my visits. To my surprise I found that the fan favorite athletes were ones that the kids had never actually watched play, just heard about from the past such as Michael Jordan, Allen Iverson, Tommie Frazier, and Scott Frost. These kids didn't know why they liked them, or much about them in all honesty. But because these athletes were so heavily talked about and still relevant in the history of their sports, they found a way to stay relevant even more than the athletes on the rise today. 

These graphics were made from student responses of the 3 most interacted with subjects.

Bonus Research: As an extra event they could do to provide further research I asked the kids to create memes about players or teams that gain a lot of attention from the media. This was more as a fun activity that was more to get everyone involved and leave the kids with an impactful impression more than to gather research. Below are the results, they had the most fun with the creative freedom of this activity and their humor was exactly as expected.