"It's Just a Prank, Bro!": Examining College Hazing with Constructivist Grounded Theory and Qualitative Research Methods

Abstract

There is a lack of in-depth, qualitative research into college hazing, particularly into groups such as sport club teams, creating gaps in understanding why hazing persists despite its risks. This project seeks to answer the questions: How do students in fraternities, sororities, and sport club teams experience hazing and how do these experiences shape how they perceive hazing? To answer these questions, I conducted semi-structured interviews with members of these groups on a college campus, and analyzed these interviews using a grounded theory approach, as per Charmaz (2006, 2017). I find that a slight majority of hazing occurs in recruitment settings, is prevalent among fraternity men’s experiences, and tends to involve alcohol consumption. Importantly, students believe hazing achieves group goals, and they minimize and normalize their experiences, creating much work for policymakers and university officials to change the conversation around prosocial group behavior and the potential harms that can emerge from hazing activities.

Curricular and co-curricular activities associated with organizational values as identified by members of men's college social fraternities

“…Text-based data in response to open-ended survey questions and narrative responses have been identified as qualitative data sources (Kendrick & Wellman, 2002). Qualitative techniques have been regularly used in examining fraternity men (Alexander, 2020;Harris & Harper, 2014;Garcia, 2020). The research methodology in this study was inductive analysis, where researchers were most concerned with how detailed information can be classified into categories (Fraenkel & Wallen, 2006).…”

El rito de iniciación de las novatadas universitarias en la ciudad de Soria

“…Aunque son un ritual cuyos orígenes se remontan a la creación de las universidades en la época medieval (de Melo Costa, 2013), han sido poco estudiadas en la literatura sociológica (Alexander y Opsal, 2021). La gran mayoría se centran en países como Estados Unidos (Alexander, 2020;Allan et al, 2019;Campo et al, 2015;Cimino, 2013;Drout y Corsoro, 2003;Montague et al, 2008), Brasil (Albanaes et al, 2014;de Melo Costa et al, 2013;Kuester et al, 2019;Maito et al, 2022) o Portugal (Alexandre y Aguiar-Conraria, 2021;Días y Sá, 2014;Estanque, 2017;Fávero et al, 2018;Mouraz y Sousa, 2016;Oliveira et al, 2016); aunque también, de forma minoritaria, hay investigaciones en otros contextos como Sri Lanka (Premadasa et al, 2011;Wickramasinghe et al, 2022), Nigeria (Ezeonu, 2014) o India (Kumar y Gupta, 2012). En el contexto español, si bien hay trabajos que abordan este fenómeno desde una perspectiva descriptiva (Aizpún, 2021;Aizpún y García-Mina, 2013;Fernández, 2021;González-Dopeso, 2021), son prácticamente inexistentes las investigaciones empíricas.…”