By Katy Popavitch

Sports and Society Initiative awarded $500 research grants to two Ohio State Ph.D. candidates, helping to fund their sports-focused research projects.

Emily Nothnagle, right, a first-year master of Social Work and Ph.D. student, received an SSI research grant for her research project on the connection between sport involvement and mental health with Dr. Chris Knoester, a professor of sociology at Ohio State and the research chair of SSI.

“It is really exciting that mental health is becoming a slightly more normalized topic of conversation within the athletic space, but I definitely think we still have work to do there,” Nothnagle said. “I think research is one great avenue to remove some of that stigma.”

Nothnagle said the money will help her develop connections with professors in different departments and will allow her to dedicate more time to this project.

“It is giving me mentorship from different people, diversifying the people that I am learning from,” Nothnagle said. “It is giving me the opportunity to do research with a data set I wouldn’t have access to otherwise and ask new questions in new ways.”

Zeynep Yavic, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in international business, is using an SSI research grant towards her study on racial bias in hiring evaluations. The study will be based on data from the Baseball Hall of Fame and the Society for American Baseball Research spanning 75 years of scouts’ evaluations of recruits. Yavic is working on her research with Dr. Ryan Ruddy, a senior lecturer in the department of economics and the assistant director of SSI.

Yavic said in sports, it is easier to measure a player’s value before and after they join a team than to measure an employee’s value at a firm.

“We have so many different ways to validate how a person’s evaluated and what their perceived value is,” Yavic said. “There is no way you can do that with any other resources.”

Yavic said the grant money will go towards gathering research data, which she wants to have completed by the end of the semester.

“There are a lot of expenses related to gathering this data, which we are still putting together.”

Yavic said she has received other research grants before and what makes the SSI research grant valuable is not only the financial aspect, but also the insights researchers receive from members of SSI.

“I think it is really important that they are not only providing financial help, but also their intellectual help and that they put in the time to support the students who got this scholarship,” Yavic said.