Abstract
The study examined how cognitive, affective, behavioural functions and patriotism influence viewing intentions to follow games of the men’s US national team and games of the FIFA World Cup in general played during the 2010 World Cup. A questionnaire that included items in three dimensions of the attitude formation theory: ‘sport knowledge’, ‘sport identification’, ‘frequency of viewing’ and ‘patriotism’ was administered to 467 sport sciences students in the USA. Results revealed that sport identification was the strongest predictor followed by patriotism and sport knowledge when examining intention to watch the World Cup games. For intention to watch games of the US national team, results showed patriotism was the most important predictor followed by sport identification and sport knowledge. ANOVA results indicated there were gender differences. In both cases, male respondents showed significantly higher mean scores than female respondents. Practical implications and methodological limitations were also discussed.
Published Version
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