In the past, high school and college sports were reserved for the toughest and most determined athletes. However, their commitment is not only tested on the playing field. According to Allan and Madden (2008), hazing has become a normal, and supposedly beneficial, tool used to push new recruits into their cutbacks and see how far they are willing to go for the team. Allan and Madden also stated in their study that hazing is defined as: "any activity expected of a person joining or participating in a group that humiliates, degrades, mistreats or endangers them, regardless of regardless of a person's willingness to participate. In the past, hazing was considered a rite of passage. For many, it was one of the last events being adolescence and the first "initiations" into adulthood. There is a common consensus among athletes that hazing is just a harmless tradition necessary to test commitment, but studies have shown that hazing has a negative effect. relationship to team cohesion in most team contexts. Hazing has become a topic of interest more recently due to numerous news articles reporting cases of hazing gone wrong, but it is still not considered a major topic of interest to many institutions and the coaching staff. allow this to happen. While it is widely believed that beginners are hazed, do these initiation ceremonies really have a positive impact on how athletes connect with each other and perform, or does it all stem from just one word, “tradition”? Say no to plagiarism. Get a Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay It's no secret that as you get older your participation in sports declines, but is there any point in being abused physically and mentally? According to a qualitative study conducted by Allan and Madden (2008), more than 50% of students who joined an on-campus organization had experienced hazing. This figure may already seem extreme, but when the demographic narrowed down to just athletes, that number jumped to 74%. In their study, they first sent a survey to 53 postsecondary institutions, which received 11,483 completed questionnaires. Their participants were both women (64%) and men (46%), ranging from 1st year to seniors over 4th year. After the round of surveys, the researchers then chose the institutions in which to conduct the interviews. These facilities were chosen based on response rate, facility location, and facility type. The interviews conducted were semi-structured with approximately 20 staff and students, from each of the 18 colleges or universities visited. One of their findings was that the most common hazing practice was forced drinking, with a total of 47% of all hazing behaviors. Among all the abuse participants experienced, a second finding was that students perceived positive outcomes of hazing as opposed to negative outcomes, and this appeared to be the case across all studies. Waldron and Kowalski (2013) found similar results through their research indicating that because students felt this was the way things should be, they no longer felt that the tasks they completed were considered demeaning or degrading, however, research saw things differently. In Waldron and Kowalski's qualitative study, they structured it the same way as the others,.