In my study I will be looking at a total of 30 different athletes. 15 male and 15 female. For each one I will use one of their Twitter posts that publicly discuss their issues with mental health and read their top comments to see how people respond or support them. Viewing the tweets will be basic content analysis because I will be separating athletes and their tweets into different coding categories in order for me to perform interpretive content analysis. Interpretive Content Analysis will allow me to count the different types of patterns I notice in tweets and athletes profiles. I will be using purposive sampling because I am choosing only 30 athletes from thousands of professional athletes. They were chosen by simple internet searches for athletes struggling with mental health. However, I had prior knowledge of male and female athletes struggling with challenges of mental health. Big names like Naomi Osaka, Simone Biles and Michael Phelps made national news with their outspoken experiences and tweets about mental health challenges. Being a college athlete myself, I had a certain amount of relatability, understanding, and sympathy with these famous professional athletes and their struggles with mental health.
