The following is a chance to help an aspiring Sports Management Professor acquire his degree.
My name is Ryan Vooris and I am a PhD student in the Department of Sport Management at Indiana University. At present I am working on my doctoral dissertation, which is a really long (300+ pages at completion) document of original (and hopefully substantial) social science research. When I’m done (and my wonderful doctoral advisory committee signs off on my work) I’ll be a professor of Sport Management and have my Doctorate of Philosophy.
My area of research is social media, particularly sports and social media. My dissertation is about how and why fans of Major League Baseball use Twitter. This research involves finding MLB fans to respond to a 39 question survey and provide some information about how they use Twitter (the survey takes 5 minutes to complete). At it’s heart, my research is about finding an answer to the always prevalent why question. Why do baseball fans use Twitter? Why do they follow MLB teams on Twitter? Why do they tweet about MLB teams?
At the end of the research I hope to have answers to those questions along with solid data on the range of motivations for baseball fans to use Twitter. I love studying Twitter. The medium is tremendously vital in the paradigm shift of our current media age because it allows native support for content creation and consumption in real time. It is therefore vital for researchers, sport communicators, and sport marketers to understand how and why people use the medium. That’s why I choose this subject for my dissertation.
To complete this work (and get my degree) I’d like to ask for your help. If you are a baseball fan and a regular Twitter user (that means at least monthly) you can help me with this research by taking the survey I mentioned above. You will find it here along with all the important disclosures from my University: https://iu.co1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_cZvdMupHThAqbQ1.
The survey is anonymous unless you choose to enter a drawing for one of five Amazon gift cards. In that case, you’ll just have to enter your email at the end of the survey. Thank you for your time and assistance.