Either/Or, Not Both!

It has been going on since the beginning of time…okay maybe not that long, but it has been a while. Ever since the two teams were both placed in Chicago the battle began. If you ask any true Chicagoan Cubs or White Sox? They would give you one answer and probably start a train of fowl language for the other team and tell you how incredibly stupid they and their fans are. This is not uncommon at all, in fact, most all Chicago baseball fans, no matter how quiet or how well-mannered and civil they are, will always give you an answer similar to that described above. Cub fans hate Sox fans and Sox fans despise Cub fans, that’s just the way it goes. As stated by two different writers in two different articles from the Chicago Tribune, “You can't be a Cubs and Sox fan at the same time. Anyone who tells you different isn't a true Chicagoan" (Hageman 3). “You're either a Cub fan or a Sox fan and there's no give, no in between" (Patel 2). I happen to agree with both of those writers in saying that the two fan bases have nothing in common, except for maybe their amount of hatred for each other and the red line (Telander 1).

With that said, something I thought that would be interesting would be to collect ACT scores from different Sox and Cub fans to find out which group of fans is smarter. The reason for this decision was that I always hear the different fans talk about how Cub fans are North side yuppies and White Sox fans are Southside blue collar folks; I don’t think that’s true at all. In fact in one of the articles I read, it actually conveys the opposite, "Cub fans look down on Sox fans as blue collar,’ [a fan] said. �But Chicago is a blue-collar town. And it's not like I'm Miss Blue Collar. I'm a lawyer" (Hageman 2). I found this statement to be very interesting, and I also do happen to know quite a few extremely intelligent Sox fans, and on the opposite end, some incredibly dimwitted Cub fans, so I believe the stereotype needs to be cleared up a bit.

With my knowledge and experience dealing with several different White Sox fans and several different Cubs fans, I believe that the White Sox fans will have a larger ACT average score and should, therefore, be considered smarter.

Some operational definitions I used for my study are as follows, a White Sox fan is someone who would call themselves an actual White Sox fan, i.e. not a bandwagon fan (a bandwagon fan is someone who calls themselves a fan just because everyone else is). A Cubs fan is someone who calls themselves an actual Cubs fan, i.e. not a bandwagon fan. When I say “smarter” in my study I base that on the groups average ACT scores, whichever group has the highest average will be considered “smarter.” I choose to use ACT scores because the ACTs were, “Designed to create a uniform method of assessmentвЂ¦Ð²Ð‚Ñœ (How to Prepare 44). It is also the most common college entrance exam taken in the United States (www.act.org). I knew that if I asked anyone what their score was they would be able to tell me right off the top of their heads, since almost 80 percent of high schoolers take it (Greenbalt 32) and they all remember what they got because it is so important to the student when they are trying to get into the college of their choice. I thought it would be a lot easier than administering IQ tests to each individual I asked, and also with the ages, most everyone takes their ACTs as a junior in high school, so the ages for the study could remain invariable.

The method I chose for my research was a correlation study. It’s not an experiment, so I was just doing a little research to find out who is slightly smarter than the other group. I wanted to see if there was a correlation between being a Sox fan and being smart or a Cub fan and being smart.

The way I went about my study is by asking people, first if they were Cubs or Sox fans, and second, what their ACT scores were. I asked 23 White Sox fans and 23 Cub fans and they each gave me their ACT scores. I then added up each groups score and averaged them out to come up with one single score to compare and see which group was smarter.

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