Interest in Sports

I'm messing with some national data from a coupla years ago about interest in sports and let's see how various sports stack up. What percentage of U.S. adults say they are "very interested" in specific sports (in no particular order):

• ATP Men's Tennis -- 4.1 percent
• ATP Women's Tennis -- 4.7 percent
• Major League Baseball -- 15.5 percent
• Minor League Baseball -- 2.5 percent
• Major League Soccer -- 2.4 percent
• International Pro Soccer -- 3.5 percent
• NBA -- 10.0 percent
• WNBA -- 2.3 percent
• Men's College Basketball -- 13.7 percent
• Women's College Basketball -- 3.9 percent
• NFL -- 23.6 percent
• College Football -- 24.4 percent
• High School Football -- 8.1 percent
• NHL -- 5.2 percent
• PGA Golf -- 9.3 percent
• LPGA Golf -- 4.1 percent
• NASCAR -- 8.9 percent
• Cycling -- 2.0 percent
• Horse Racing -- 4.5 percent
• Figure Skating -- 16.0 percent
• Boxing -- 7.2 percent
• Mixed Martial Arts -- 4.8 percent
• BASS Fishing -- 3.1 percent

Because it's a Friday I left a bunch out, like skateboarding and swimming and so son. And I didn't bother ordering them. As you can tell, and as no surprise, NFL dominates in terms of the U.S. sports audience.

The data needs to be merged with some demographics so I can break people down by race and sex and region of the country. That's a summer project because then it opens up a whole set of interesting analyses for papers or articles or blog posts to be read by tens of people worldwide.

I even have questions on how often people watch sports on TV and how often they've attended certain sporting events (all the categories above, plus those I left out).

And here's the best part. In the same data I (think) I have questions on favorite movie genres. I can even break people down by the kinds of clubs they belong to, their hobbies, the music they listen to, and most important -- their attitudes about race. That last one is definitely a paper in the making. As my grad class in (irony alert) secondary analysis did not "make" for the summer, I have lots of time to crank data.