Analytical report for school...ideas?

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Originally Posted by kenny1234

On the stadium idea - there is a lot of research that has been done on whether it is worth it for cities to help fund stadiums. Essentially cost-benefit analysis of the impact of pro sports on local economies. You could take this issue and do an analysis of a particular market and whether the city/state should support a new park.

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This is basically what we've morphed the topic into - are new baseball stadiums beneficial to the cities they are in? The answer, based on all the research available, is basically, no. They're not necessarily harmful, but they are not beneficial.

I'm stuck right now at what graphs I should include. I am including a bar graph of recently built stadiums and the money the public spent to build it compared to the money the team spent itself. I am also going to do a line graph comparing team revenue in the years prior to a new stadium, and the years immediately following the construction of a new stadium. We are also taking a small survey of people (that, really, provides essentially meaningless information if this was a serious study, but since a survey is required, we have to fudge up something) and will likely construct pie graphs or something from those.

Beyond those, I'm at a loss of what other sorts of graphs to include. I'm hoping that those graphs, plus two overhead pictures of Chicago's two stadiums that I found in an interesting case study of the Chicago stadiums, will take up enough space that we can fill the rest of the 10 pages with writing, but if anybody has any other possibilities, please throw them out.

are you going to survey us?

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Originally Posted by TheNamelessPoet

are you going to survey us?

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One of the other people in my group is doing the survey. I'm constructing the graphs and writing up something from that Chicago report I found, as well as a report on the construction of a stadium in Washington DC (from before it happened).

aww :( I wanted to be surveyed *sniffle*

Here are a couple of links to academic papers that are related to your topic - they are available through JSTOR (or through alternate channels) so they do require subscriptions. However, those subscriptions are common on most university/college campuses so you can probably access the articles there. If not, let me know and I'll look into alternative methods of access.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2646921
http://jse.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/3/4/361

The basic idea of both papers is that sports facilities have little effect on the local community - primarily because they don't generate new revenue. The increased attendance/ticket prices that are paid to the owners of MLB tend to come from reduced expenditures on other local entertainment sources. As the money that is given to professional sports tends to leave the community - players and owners don't spend very much of their money locally - that generates a net loss for the community as a whole.