A Study on Attractive Elements Characteristic of Paralympic Sports

Abstract

As the second Tokyo Olympic Games and Paralympic Games are held in Japan in 2020, attention to the Paralympic Games and sports for people with disabilities is getting higher in Japan than before. However, the current situation is that the degree of interest in sports for the disabled (Paralympic sports) is lower than in sports intended for healthy people (Olympic sports). Therefore, with the goal of publicizing the attractiveness of sports effectively, the purpose of this study is to clarify the characteristic attractiveness of Paralympic sports. First, a selection of terms to evaluate the attractiveness of Paralympic sports was conducted through the SD method and text mining of free descriptions. Next, using the 14 pairs of evaluation terms selected, the impression evaluations of Olympic sports and Paralympic sports were performed on 52 university students. As a result of performing t-test of the score average, significant differences were found among the 11 evaluation items. In addition, as a result of analysis, Tournament factor, Star factor, and Audience factor were extracted in Olympic sports, and Watching factor, Player factor and Blind factor in Paralympic sports. It became clear that the unique attractive elements of the Paralympic sports are the items of power, affinity and recognition. If these three items are sufficiently reflected in videos and PR, it can be expected that the degree of recognition of sports for the disabled will improve.