It's Just An Experiment

After rifling through search engine after search engine, I came to the conclusion that experiments in sports public relations are no where to be found on the internet.  So, I decided to attempt to design my own, along with the assistance of a blog that discusses the "never look down" idea at a sporting event.  This idea implements enough entertainment and socialization at a sporting even that spectators will not want to look down to check the time, their e-mail or their text messages.

This week in class, we learned about the ideal experimental design for conducting an experiment in public relations.  It reads the following:
1. R___PRE___E___POST
2. R___PRE_______POST
3. R_________E____POST
4. R______________POST

where the R stands for needing the sample to be chosen at random, PRE stands for the pretest participants will take, E stands for the experimental variable being implemented, and POST stands for the post test participants will take.

For my experiment, I want to test the impact that in-game entertainment has on a fan's experience at a sporting event.  The control group would consist of attendees at a game that does not have excessive in-game entertainment.  It would have the basic elements of a sporting event: some chants, few on screen videos and a set musical playlist.  The experimental group would contain attendees of a game that promoted more in-game entertainment such as prizes and give aways, crowd leader to hype the crowd up and engage them in interaction, music suited for the perceived attitude of the crowd and entertaining videos during time-outs and commercial breaks (and whatever else could be thought of).

Before each event (entertaining vs relatively non-entertaining), seat numbers would be randomly pulled and those attendees would be chosen as participants for the experiment.  Part of the attendees would take a pretest and all of the participants would take the post test at the end of the event.

The independent variable in this experiment would be the experiences of the individuals and the dependent variable would be the entertainment in the game.

This experiment would be beneficial to sports PR professionals because they can see if their efforts of involving the community in the event help to boost satisfaction among their publics and therefore spread positive word of mouth about the event.