KFF/ESPN Survey of 1988 NFL Players

This KFF/ESPN Survey of 1988 NFL Players was designed and analyzed by public opinion researchers at KFF in collaboration with reporters at ESPN. The survey was designed to reach a representative sample of former NFL players who participated in at least one game during the 1988 season. 1,532 individuals were identified as meeting this criteria. The survey was conducted from October 17 through November 30, 2024 online and by telephone. All fieldwork was managed by Davis Research.

Sample and Contact Methods
All players included in the population were researched and contact information was verified using multiple sources including Lexis-Nexis and Marketing Systems Group (MSG). Of the 1,532 former NFL players who participated in at least one game during the 1988 season, 128 were identified as deceased either prior to fielding or learned about during fielding.  For those cases, interviews with proxy respondents were attempted. Population members were originally contacted using USPS business letter explaining the project and providing both a website to complete the survey as well as an inbound telephone number for the individual to complete the survey with a live trained interviewer. Nonresponse follow-up included email contacts, a reminder letter, as well as telephone calls and text messages. Each player record contained up to six telephone numbers, and attempts were made to contact each record up to eight times. Calls and text messages were made at various times, including evenings and weekends, to maximize response rates.

The final sample includes interviews with 546 former players. An additional 18 interviews with family members of deceased players, and 1 interview with a family member of a living player who was identified as having cognition issues helped to contribute to the reporting.

Participants, including proxy respondents, were offered a $100 gift card or the option to donate the amount to Gridiron Greats, a charity supporting former NFL players.

Representation Considerations
The project team took careful consideration to ensure the sample accurately reflected the population under study. One step in order to accomplish this was to track the sample demographics to the population demographics across key variables such as race and ethnicity, position, teams, and years in the league. While the majority of this information was publicly available for the population, race and ethnicity were coded by researchers at Davis Research and KFF. Intercoder reliability was achieved with 10% of the population, Cohen’s kappa (κ) of .898.

In order to increase the likelihood of interviewing Black players, Davis Research in collaboration with KFF maximized efforts to increase participation for that population, including additional telephone calls to targeted records, mailing approximately 500 USPS Priority Mail envelopes to non-responsive records flagged as likely Black/African American, and conducted additional research to refine contact information for records flagged as likely Black/African American.

Response rates were closely monitored throughout fielding to ensure both quality and balanced representation. The net effective response rate (AAPOR Response Rate 5) for living players was 40% and 16% respectively for family members of deceased players.

The final sample quality was assessed by researchers and no weighting adjustments were needed. The margin of sampling error for the full sample is plus or minus 3 percentage points. Numbers of respondents and margins of sampling error for key subgroups are shown in the table below. For results based on other subgroups, the margin of sampling error may be higher. Sampling error is only one of many potential sources of error and there may be other unmeasured error in this or any other public opinion poll.

KFF public opinion and survey research is a charter member of the Transparency Initiative of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

National comparison data throughout the accompanying reports is based on KFF analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 2023 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS); National Center for Health Statistics 2023 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS); the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2023 American Community Survey (ACS); and KFF’s Racism, Discrimination, and Health Survey (June 6 – August 14, 2023.) Data from BRFSS is among men ages 55-74; all other data is among men ages 55-75. All estimates are based on self-reported survey results and may differ from other clinical estimates.