Investigating motivation, attitudinal loyalty and attendance behaviour with fans of Australian football

The present study examined how individual difference factors contribute to attitudes and behaviour of spectators attending an Australian Football League game. The results revealed that four factors: Team Interest, Vicarious Achievement, Excitement and Player Interest were successful in predicting level of loyalty, while five factors: Vicarious Achievement, Player Interest, Entertainment Value, Drama and Socialization predicted game day attendance. This study illustrates the applicability of the Sport Interest Inventory developed in North America to understand motivational factors of Australian sports fans.

Fans teaching fans how to consume : the role of ritual in the consumption of entertainment

The status of entertainment as both a dimension of human culture, and a booming global industry is increasing. Given more recent consumer-centric definitions of entertainment, the entertainment consumer has grown in prominence and is now coming under closer scrutiny. However viewing entertainment consumers as always behaving in a similar fashion towards entertainment as to other products may be selling them short. For a start, entertainment consumers can exhibit a strong loyalty towards their favourite entertainment products that is the envy of the marketing world. Academic researchers and marketers who are keen to investigate entertainment consumers would benefit from a theoretical base from which to commence. This essay therefore, takes a consumer-oriented focus in defining entertainment and conceptualises a model of entertainment consumption. In approaching the study of entertainment one axiomatic question remains: how should we define it? Richard Dyer notes that, considering that the category of entertainment can include – by its own definition in the song ‘That’s entertainment!’ – everything from Hamlet and Oedipus Rex to ‘the clown with his pants falling down’ and ‘the lights on the lady in tights’, it doesn’t make much sense to try to define entertainment as being marked by particular textual features (as is done, for example, by Avrich, 2002). Dyer’s position is rather that ‘entertainment is not so much a category of things as an attitude towards things’ (Dyer, 1973: 9). He traces the modern conception of entertainment back to the writings of Molière. This writer defended the purpose of his plays against attacks from the church that they were not sufficiently edifying by insisting that, as entertainments he had no interest in edifying audiences – his ‘real purpose …was to provide people pleasure – and the definition of that was to be decided by “the people”’(Dyer, 1973: 9). In my own discipline of Marketing this approach has been embraced – Kaser and Oelkers, for example, define entertainment as ‘whatever people are willing to spend their money and spare time viewing’ (2008, 18). That is the approach taken in this paper, where I see entertainment as ‘consumer-driven culture’ (McKee and Collis, 2009) – a definition that is closely aligned with the marketing concept. Within a marketing framework I explore what the consumption of entertainment can tell us about the relationships between consumers and culture more generally. For entertainment offers an intriguing case study, and is often consumed in ways that challenge many of our assumptions about marketing and consumer behaviour.

Fan writers [Författande fans]

[In Swedish: Varje dag ägnar sig mängder av ungdomar åt att skriva, läsa och kommentera fanfiction, berättelser baserade på karaktärer från redan kända verk. I fanfiction förflyttas förlagans miljöer och karaktärer in i andra sammanhang där nya historier skapas. Ungdomarna gör sina texter tillgängliga på olika nätsajter, där läsare över hela världen i interaktion med skribenterna kan kommentera och påverka. Detta möjliggör en kraftfull skrivprocess där aktörerna agerar som både författare, läsare och kritiker. Läs mer om boken på studentlitteratur.se]

Friends or followers? The relations between German soccer clubs and their fans on Twitter

This paper shows how soccer clubs from Germany’s first division have started to use Twitter. Analysis is based on tweets from and to club accounts as well as on follower numbers, and specific clubs are selected for case studies. This approach reveals that Twitter mirrors the conflicts between professional sports and traditional fandom.

Superstars and disloyal football fans : factors influencing attraction to competition

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of superstars (and other factors) on football fans’ attraction to competition (i.e. disloyal behavior). Design/methodology/approach – A proprietary data set including archival data on professional German football players and clubs as well as survey data of more than 900 football fans is used. The hypotheses are tested with two-sample mean-comparison t-tests and multivariate probit models. Findings – This study provides evidence that superstars both attract new fans and contribute to the retention of existing fans. While the presence of superstars, team loyalty and team identification prevent football fans from being attracted to competition, the team's recent performance seems to have no effect. Fans who select their favorite player from a competing team rather choose superstars, young players, players who are known for exemplary behavior and defenders. Originality/value – This paper contributes to existing research by expanding the list of antecedents of disloyalty and by being the first to employ independent, quantitative data for the assessment of superstar characteristics in the context of team loyalty.

Mental hoop diaries: emotional memories of a college basketball game in rival fans.

The rivalry between the men's basketball teams of Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC) is one of the most storied traditions in college sports. A subculture of students at each university form social bonds with fellow fans, develop expertise in college basketball rules, team statistics, and individual players, and self-identify as a member of a fan group. The present study capitalized on the high personal investment of these fans and the strong affective tenor of a Duke-UNC basketball game to examine the neural correlates of emotional memory retrieval for a complex sporting event. Male fans watched a competitive, archived game in a social setting. During a subsequent functional magnetic resonance imaging session, participants viewed video clips depicting individual plays of the game that ended with the ball being released toward the basket. For each play, participants recalled whether or not the shot went into the basket. Hemodynamic signal changes time locked to correct memory decisions were analyzed as a function of emotional intensity and valence, according to the fan's perspective. Results showed intensity-modulated retrieval activity in midline cortical structures, sensorimotor cortex, the striatum, and the medial temporal lobe, including the amygdala. Positively valent memories specifically recruited processing in dorsal frontoparietal regions, and additional activity in the insula and medial temporal lobe for positively valent shots recalled with high confidence. This novel paradigm reveals how brain regions implicated in emotion, memory retrieval, visuomotor imagery, and social cognition contribute to the recollection of specific plays in the mind of a sports fan.

The Source of 3 Minute Magnetoacoustic Oscillations in Coronal Fans

We use images of high spatial, spectral, and temporal resolution, obtained using both ground- and space-based instrumentation, to investigate the coupling between wave phenomena observed at numerous heights in the solar atmosphere. Analysis of 4170 Å continuum images reveals small-scale umbral intensity enhancements, with diameters ~0."6, lasting in excess of 30 minutes. Intensity oscillations of ˜3 minutes are observed to encompass these photospheric structures, with power at least three orders of magnitude higher than the surrounding umbra. Simultaneous chromospheric velocity and intensity time series reveal an 87?±8? out-of-phase behavior, implying the presence of standing modes created as a result of partial wave re?ection at the transition region boundary. We ?nd a maximum waveguide inclination angle of˜40? between photospheric and chromospheric heights, combined with a radial expansion factor of <76%. An average blueshifted Doppler velocity of ˜1.5 km s-1, in addition to a time lag between photospheric and chromospheric oscillatory phenomena, con?rms the presence of upwardly propagating slow-mode waves in the lower solar atmosphere. Propagating oscillations in EUV intensity are detected in simultaneous coronal fan structures, with a periodicity of 172±17 s and a propagation velocity of 45±7 km s-1. Numerical simulations reveal that the damping of the magnetoacoustic wave trains is dominated by thermal conduction. The coronal fans are seen to anchor into the photosphere in locations where large-amplitude umbral dot (UD) oscillations manifest. Derived kinetic temperature and emission measure time series display prominent outof-phase characteristics, and when combined with the previously established sub-sonic wave speeds, we conclude that the observed EUV waves are the coronal counterparts of the upwardly propagating magnetoacoustic slow modes detected in the lower solar atmosphere. Thus, for the ?rst time, we reveal how the propagation of 3 minute magnetoacoustic waves in solar coronal structures is a direct result of amplitude enhancements occurring in photospheric UDs.photospheric UDs.