Holy Cross Student Survey 1

Holy Cross Student Survey

The Holy Cross Student Survey (HCSS) is a high-quality, structured, personal interview survey of Holy Cross students conducted by students enrolled in Methods of Social Research. Since the project began in fall 2001, eleven surveys have been carried out. This site provides information about the HCSS; for each survey, I describe the general purpose, sample, and the types of questions asked, and I present an overview of the findings. If you would like to see more detailed charts and tables, are interested in additional analyses, or would like to obtain a SPSS data file for any of the surveys, please contact Royce Singleton at .

General Introduction

The HCSS has a twofold purpose: to generate systematic data on the Holy Cross student body and to provide methods students with hands-on experience in conducting a personal interview survey. Modeled after the General Social Survey (GSS), a well-known omnibus national survey, each HCSS has a series of questions on a special topic and a set of background, behavioral, and attitudinal items that are asked in successive surveys. In contrast to the GSS, however, the bulk of the questions in the HCSS pertain to the topical focus:

  • sports and sport participation (fall 2001)
  • religious beliefs and practices (spring 2002)
  • participation in the arts and popular culture (fall 2002)
  • activities outside the classroom (spring 2003)
  • health behaviors (fall 2003)
  • politics and current issues (spring 2004)
  • friendship (fall 2004, spring 2005)
  • voluntarism and helping (spring 2007)
  • politics and current issues (spring 2008)
  • information and communication technology (spring 2009)

The HCSS has several key design features. First, it is structured: all respondents are asked the same questions in the same order, and nearly all questions have a fixed and limited set of response alternatives. Second, many questions are drawn from existing surveys, including the GSS. Third, the respondents are selected randomly from the entire student body. Fourth, it is based on personal, or face-to-face, interviews. Fifth, the interview generally takes between 15 and 20 minutes to complete.

Each of these features contributes to the goal of yielding reliable data on the attitudes and behaviors of Holy Cross students. Using existing questions capitalizes on the efforts of other researchers to develop reliable questions. Drawing a random sample provides a basis for calculating the margin of error, that is, the amount by which a sample estimate is likely to differ from the value for the entire population. And using personal interviews and keeping the interview relatively short facilitate a high response rate, an important indicator of survey quality.

Fall 2001 Survey: Sport

General Purpose, Questions, and Sample

Despite the prominence of college sports, there is very little systematic evidence on the impact of athletic participation on students’ lives. Some recent publications such as James Shulman and William Bowen’s (2001) The Game of Life raise questions about the widening gulf between varsity athletes and other students. Are athletes less prepared academically? Do they have a different educational experience? Do they develop different life goals and values than their classmates? The national debate on these questions was the impetus for the fall survey. The general goal of the survey was to describe the past and present sports experiences of all Holy Cross students.

The fall HCSS included questions that addressed the following topics:

  1. Students’ pre-college sport experiences, from informal games to organized youth sports and sport participation in elementary school and high school.
  2. The experiences of Holy Cross varsity athletes, such as time devoted to their sport, its impact on their academic work, and the effects of sport injuries.
  3. Students’ participation in club sports and intramural sports and attendance at varsity athletic events.
  4. Students’ satisfaction with various aspects of college life, engagement in various college activities, and the importance assigned to certain life goals (e.g., raising a family, being very well off financially).
  5. Other student attitudes and behavior such as political views, volunteerism, and drinking.
  6. Students’ demographic background, including race, religion, age, gender, and parent’s education.

Item 4 questions were drawn from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Freshman Survey, and a few other questions were drawn from the GSS, but nearly all sports-related questions were developed for this survey.

Interviews in the fall 2001 HCSS were carried out between October 30 and December 5. A sample of 291 respondents was randomly selected from the 2,593 Holy Cross students enrolled and on campus as of October 2001. The population thus excluded, in addition to those students enrolled in Methods of Social Research, all students who were studying away or abroad or who had taken a leave of absence. A total of 251 interviews were completed, yielding an 86 percent response rate and a margin of error of about 6 percent.

Among the 251 respondents, 52 percent were female, 87 percent were white, 95 percent ranged in age from 18 to 21, and 80 percent identified themselves as Catholics. Eighty percent of the respondents lived on campus. And because of the sizeable number of third-year students who study abroad, there were fewer respondents from the third-year class (21 percent) than the other classes (25 to 29 percent).

Major Findings

Pre-College Sport Experiences

We began the survey interview by asking respondents to think about their earliest memory of playing informal sports or physical games such as kick ball, jump rope, and tag. Most respondents (73 percent) reported that they were between the ages of 4 and 6 when they began playing informal sport games. Four activities accounted for two-thirds of the first games that respondents remembered playing: tag, soccer, baseball (including whiffle ball and tee ball), and kick ball. Five other games accounted for another 19 percent: football, basketball, hide-and-seek, jump rope, and hockey. Men were more likely than women to remember first playing sports such as baseball, football, basketball, soccer, and hockey, whereas women were more likely to remember first playing informal games such as tag, kick ball, and jump rope.

Most respondents remembered playing their first games with friends (70 percent), followed by brothers (33 percent), fathers (30 percent), sisters (23 percent), others (20 percent), and mothers (11 percent). The biggest gender difference here is that women (36 percent) were far more likely than men (10 percent) to report playing with a sister. Finally, the vast majority (94 percent) reported that their earliest experiences playing informal physical games were either “very positive” (69 percent) or “somewhat positive” (25 percent).

Over 90 percent of the respondents reported that they participated in organized youth sports. Youth soccer was mentioned most often (69 percent), followed by Little League baseball (49 percent), town recreational basketball (41 percent), girls’ softball (24 percent), and junior tennis (20 percent). Eighty percent of the men had played Little League baseball and over 76 percent had played youth soccer; 57 percent had played town recreational or church league basketball, and 22 percent had played Pop Warner football. The most popular organized youth sports among women were soccer (62 percent), girls’ softball (49 percent), basketball (35 percent), tennis (30 percent), gymnastics (27 percent), and swimming (25 percent).

Virtually every respondent had played sport games in elementary school, and 88 percent played on a high school sport team that competed against other schools. The high school athletes competed in 29 different sports; over three-quarters competed on more than one sport team, with men (84 percent) more likely than women (69 percent) to play multiple sports. The most common interscholastic sports among men were soccer and basketball (35 percent), football (31 percent), track and field (28 percent), and baseball (24 percent). With the exception of football, these also were the most popular sports among women: track and field (32 percent), basketball (31 percent), soccer (26 percent), and softball (24 percent).

Holy Cross Intercollegiate Athletes

In recent years, according to statistics compiled by the Athletic Department, approximately 25 percent of the Holy Cross student body is a member of a varsity intercollegiate sport team. This figure corresponds to the sample data, as 34 percent of the respondents reported that they had been on a varsity team, but nearly one-quarter of these respondents were no longer on the team, yielding a total of 64 athletes, or 25.5 percent of the sample who were still participating. Three-quarters of these intercollegiate athletes reported that they were recruited to play sports at Holy Cross; this figure was somewhat higher—80 percent—for the athletes who were still competing.

Students who were no longer on a team had participated from one month to over three years. The following analyses describe the 71 varsity athletes who were either still competing or had competed for at least two years. Forty-six of these athletes were men and 25 were women. They played 14 different sports at Holy Cross, with the greatest numbers of athletes in the sample coming from football (15), track and field (14), crew (10), soccer (6), basketball and lacrosse (5).

Varsity athletes reported that they devoted an average of nearly 25 hours a week to their sport in-season. The time commitment and general devotion to their sport had various effects on athlete’s academic lives. About two-thirds reported that they missed classes due to travel and/or competition once a month or more and over one-third missed class at least once every two weeks. Three-quarters of the athletes also said that at times they felt so emotionally and physically exhausted from practicing, playing, or traveling that they had trouble concentrating on their academic work. This effect occurred 1-2 times a week or more for 45 percent of the athletes. Finally, nearly three-quarters of the athletes reported that they had chosen not to take a course because it was being offered at a time that conflicted with the team’s practice or playing schedule. A similar percentage also reported that their course selection was affected either “to a large extent” (14 percent) or “to some extent” (58 percent) by playing a sport at Holy Cross.

Among the group of 71 athletes, 20 (or 28 percent) said that they had suffered an injury during their playing career at Holy Cross that required surgery or long-term care and rehabilitation. Nine athletes in this group had more than one injury of this sort. When asked about specific consequences of such an injury, 47 percent reported that it caused them to miss classes, 40 percent that it caused them to fall behind in classes, and 20 percent that it caused them to be ignored by their teammates. One in four also reported that their injury forced them to leave the team. Finally, nearly one in five athletes said that they had had a chronic or nagging injury that did not prevent them from playing but that affected their ability to concentrate on their academic work.

Other Forms of Athletic Participation at Holy Cross

Holy Cross students also competed in club and intramural sports and attended varsity athletic events. Twenty-two percent of the respondents had competed in a club sport; 39 percent had played intramural sports. Non-varsity athletes were the predominant participants in the club sports; however, athletes and non-varsity athletes were equally likely to have played intramural sports. Overall, two-thirds of the sample had played either a varsity, club, or intramural sport at Holy Cross; four of five men and one of two women had participated.

Close to 100 percent of the respondents reported that they had attended at least one varsity intercollegiate athletic event at Holy Cross; moreover, most of them had attended several different games. While football attracted the most students, nearly three-quarters of the sample had attended a men’s basketball game, close to 60 percent had attended a women’s basketball game, and nearly 60 percent had gone to an ice hockey game. Over 80 percent of the sample identified themselves as sports fans, and most of these fans described themselves further as either “very enthusiastic” or “enthusiastic.”

Varsity Athlete – Other Comparisons

There were few differences between varsity athletes and others on the attitudes, values, and behaviors that were measured. For example, varsity athletes and non-varsity athletes expressed similar levels of satisfaction with several aspects of campus life, such as the overall quality of instruction and their overall academic experience, student residence life, and the quality of social life. They assigned equal importance to several life goals, including raising a family, helping others who are in difficulty, performing community service, helping to promote racial understanding, keeping up to date with world events, and integrating spirituality into their lives. Consistent with Shulman and Bowen’s findings in The Game of Life, varsity athletes tended to value being very well off financially more strongly than other students, and they also were more likely to characterize themselves as politically conservative.

One clear difference between varsity athletes and other students was involvement in extracurricular activities other than sports. Athletes were much less likely than their classmates to have attended a public lecture, play or concert on campus, and male athletes were less likely to have participated in voluntary service activities such as Student Programs for Urban Development (SPUD). Also, athletes reported that they drank alcoholic beverages less often than their classmates, although they tended to consume the same number of drinks when they chose to drink.

Spring 2002 Survey: Religion

General Purpose, Questions, and Sample

Spurred by a well-publicized alumni critique and subsequent discussion of the secularization of the College, we designed the spring survey to learn about the religious background, beliefs, attitudes, and practices of Holy Cross students. The debate over secularization raised questions about the involvement of students in the religious life of the campus. It also suggested that many people associated with the College, including the critical alumni, were making assumptions about students’ religious beliefs and behavior in the absence of systematic empirical evidence. Therefore, a survey of Holy Cross students should provide information of broad interest to the College community.

The spring HCSS included questions that addressed the following topics:

  1. Religious background of students, including each parent’s religion and frequency of church attendance.
  2. Students’ present religious beliefs and activities.
  3. Students’ involvement in the activities of the Campus Ministry Center.
  4. Other student values, attitudes, and behavior such as political views, drinking, attitude toward the death penalty.
  5. Students’ demographic background, such as race, nationality, age, gender, and parent’s education.
  6. Among students who identified their present religious preference as Catholic, support for Catholic doctrine and strength of identity as Catholics.

Many of the questions were drawn from national surveys, including the General Social Survey (GSS), the American Catholics Surveys of 1993 and 1999, the 1995 Ministry with Young Adults Survey, and the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Freshman Survey. Using items from these surveys enables us to compare Holy Cross students with various other sample populations on several questions.

Interviews in the spring 2002 HCSS were carried out between March 21 and May 1. A sample of 250 respondents was randomly selected from the 2,576 Holy Cross students enrolled and on campus as of March 2002. The population thus excluded, in addition to those students enrolled in Methods of Social Research, all students who were studying away or abroad or who had taken a leave of absence. A total of 223 interviews were completed, yielding an 89 percent response rate and a margin of error of about 7 percent.

Among the 223 respondents, 54 percent were female, 89 percent were white, 98 percent ranged in age from 18 to 22, 44 percent identified themselves as Irish Americans and 22 percent as Italian Americans. Eighty percent of the respondents lived on campus. And because of the sizeable number of third-year students who study abroad, there were fewer respondents from the third-year class (19 percent) than the other classes (26 to 28 percent).

Major Findings

Religious Background of Students

The data show the strong Catholic background of the vast majority of Holy Cross students. Ninety percent of the respondents reported that either one or both parents were Catholic, and 83 percent reported that they were raised as Catholics. Of those respondents not raised as Catholic, most were raised as Protestants (12 percent), representing various denominations including Episcopalian, Lutheran, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Methodist. The remaining few respondents reported either no religion or an Eastern religion (Buddhist, Hindu, or Islam).