Together but not scrambled? Ethnic discrimination and a low-cost intervention

The intervention consists of an email which the Center for Research in Sports Administration (CSRA) sends to a random half of the sample. In this email the CSRA shares a link with a video with the coaches. In this video two famous professional football players inform the coaches about the importance of integration.

2023-07-19

2023-08-03

We are interested in the response rate towards applications from Swiss- and foreign sounding names for respondents in the control and in the treatment group.

Our outcome variable is the response of coaches of the amateur football clubs to the request to join a training. In the control group (the group of coaches who have not been sent an email by the federation), we expect a positive gap in positive response rates to emails signed with a native and foreign-sounding name. In the treatment group, we expect that this gap is smaller. A positive response is defined as either an invitation to come to a training or a conditional acceptance (e.g. yes, you're welcome, but only if you are a player of a particular type, e.g. defender).

Additionally, we are interested if our primary outcomes are influenced by, e.g., the location of the team, the league a team plays in, or the gender of the players (i.e., men or women team).

revious field experiments show that amateur soccer clubs discriminate against people with foreign-sounding names. We want to replicate parts of these experiments. In addition, our key aim is to detect if it is possible to decrease discrimination.

We follow the method of previous research (e.g., Nesseler et al., (2019) or Gomez-Gonzalez et al., (2021)). Thus, we create fictitious amateur soccer players that are asking amateur soccer teams to participate in a trial session. We then evaluate the response of the soccer clubs.

Following the recommendations of the ethical committee, we send another email to coaches who respond to the request to join a training. The email aims to minimize the impact on coaches and reads as follows: "Thank you very much for your answer. Unfortunately, I am no longer interested."

References
Gomez-Gonzalez, C., Nesseler, C., & Dietl, H. M. (2021). Mapping discrimination in Europe through a field experiment in amateur sport. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 8(1), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00773-2

Nesseler, C., Gomez-Gonzalez, C., & Dietl, H. (2019). What’s in a name? Measuring access to social activities with a field experiment. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 5(1), 1-7. doi: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0372-0

We use a random seed with the Stata "set seed" command.

We randomize at the regional level. In this way we ensure that individual names are not overrepresented in specific regions.

No

Around 1150 amateur football coaches

Around 1150 amateur football coaches

This is the same as we do not have clusters. Around 1150 amateur football coaches

In previous research a similar intervention had a minor effect (see Dur et al., 2022). Thus, if we expect that the intervention has a minor effect (similar to previous studies) of 3 percentage points we need at least 500 observations (with a power of around 0.9) to detect this difference. Accordingly, we decided to have four groups: Swiss sounding names in the control and treatment group and foreign sounding names in the control and treatment group.