Does watching sports make people happy? Time magazine says it does. Their headline for this study reads, “Why Watching Sports Makes People Happy”. Let’s examine whether the study they reviewed is set up to establish causation.
The World Cup wrapped up a few weeks ago, and many of us miss following the teams and looking forward to the next big match. Watching sports certainly feels fun, but does it make us happy?
Read the following study description from Time, in which I have helpfully bolded all of the causal verb phrases:
Research by U.K. psychologist Helen Keyes and others has revealed that watching sports of all kinds, both in-person and on a screen, can have positive impacts on well-being. And even when your team loses—as they are practically guaranteed to do at some point—fans still get something out of the social act of following a team.
Using data from a survey of more than 7,000 people in the U.K., Keyes and her colleagues set out in 2023 to see whether attending a live sporting event in the last year changed people’s self-reported anxiety, loneliness, and sense that life was worth living, among other measures. They also looked at links between these factors and demographic data, such as whether people were employed, their health status, and their gender. The games didn’t have to be high-priced events with professional players; local matches between amateurs counted, too.
What they found was that attending a live match significantly boosted some measures of well-being. “Attending a live sporting event was associated with a greater sense that your life is worthwhile,” Keyes says. Life satisfaction went up, and loneliness diminished. They found that attending a live event had an even greater impact on people’s sense that life was worth living than whether they had a job or not.
I can’t stand it! There are way too many causal verbs in this story!
a) Reread the information in the middle paragraph above (“Using data from…”) and identify some of the study’s major variables. I count at least seven. List them on the table below.
| Variable name | What might have been the levels of this variable? If you don’t know the levels, you could write, “low to high” | Was this variable manipulated? Or measured? |
b) Attend carefully to the proposed causal variable, “attending a live sporting match.” Was this variable manipulated? Or just measured? Explain your answer.
c) Was this an experiment or a correlational design? (Why?)
I need to give you my take. It’s not an experiment. They didn’t randomly assign the 7,000 people to attend a sports match or not. They just identified people who had and people who hadn’t. What’s more, they didn’t even measure people over time. This was a one-shot, big ‘ol survey that they ran on 7,000 people. (If you don’t believe me, you can find the details in the empirical journal article in Frontiers in Public Health)
Knowing that information, let’s apply the three rules of causation. We’ll examine the claim, “attending a live match significantly boosted some measures of well-being” because “Life satisfaction went up“
d) What are the two variables in this claim. What makes this claim causal?
e) Does the study have covariance? (that is, what do the results say about the relationship between the two variables?)
f) Does the study achieve temporal precedence? (that is, did the method make sure that the causal variable came first in time? Might the causal path plausibly go in the opposite direction, and what would that be?)
g) Does the study rule out internal validity problems? Why not? Can you think of a specific third variable (C) that might explain the association between attending a live sports event (A) and having higher life satisfaction (B)?
h) Why do you think the journalist festooned their story with so many causal verbs?