RESEARCHER: SUPER BOWL LINK TO VIOLENCE DISTORTED

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, February 2, 1993                   TAG: 9302020193
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
RESEARCHER: SUPER BOWL LINK TO VIOLENCE DISTORTED
Women's rights activists misinterpreted a report on football's link to to violence against women at a pre-Super Bowl news conference, the study's author said.
Garland White, a sociologist at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, said lawyer Sheila Kuehl erred when she told reporters Thursday that the study showed that beatings went up by 40 percent after games won by the Washington Redskins during the 1988-89 season.
"We didn't publish that," White said Sunday.
"What we said was that after the Redskins won [during the 1988-89 season], we found that women's trips to emergency rooms . . . were slightly higher than average," White said. "We found that significant but something in need of much further research."
At the news conference at the Rose Bowl, Kuehl, Linda Mitchell of the media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting and other activists said shelters and violence hot lines are flooded with more calls from victims on Super Bowl Sunday than on any other day of the year.
Police in several cities contacted by The Associated Press said there was no rise in the typical number of domestic violence calls Sunday evening.
The activists used the news conference to announce that NBC-TV had agreed to air a public service announcement against domestic violence.
Kuehl, who cited the study's findings to bolster her argument of a connection between football viewing and violence against women, said she did not think she had distorted the research.
Mitchell, who appeared at the news conference with Kuehl and made similar links between domestic violence and the Super Bowl, said she recognized that Kuehl had misrepresented the study's findings but did not challenge her.
"I wouldn't do that in front of the media," she said in Sunday's editions of The Washington Post.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB