Cultural factors and documented concussion reports in collegiate football players: exploring the effects of macro- and exo- system factors

Despite the well-publicized negative health consequences of repeated traumatic brain injury, non-reporting concussion rates have remained constant over recent years, especially in high-risk sports such as college football. This study, grounded in Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory (1998), evaluates the hypothesis that the number of publicly acknowledged concussions by NCAA college football teams will be inversely related to the cultural factors hypothesized to constrain players’ non-reporting behavior, and by extension, the number of publicly acknowledged concussions reported by NCAA football teams. All data used for this study was derived from publicly-reported data found online pertaining to teams playing during the 2017-2018 football season, using data scraping and mining methods using the open-source statistical package R, and R sub-packages, and secondary analyses of text data using LIWC. Indicators of the outcome variable, number of publicly acknowledged concussions, and all indicators were derived from various sources of online data including financial reports, team success records, and social media. A principal components analysis identified one component which, although unrelated to diagnosed concussions, was significantly related to suspected concussions (head and neck injuries). Implications include both methodological and applied outcomes regarding construction of cultural-level variables and football culture’s impact on the safety and well-being of players