An Examination of Levels of Fandom, Team Identification, Socialization Processes, and Fan Behaviors in Qatar.

BEHAVIORAL assessment; PSYCHOMETRICS; SPORTS psychology; TEAM sports; COLLEGE students; COMPARATIVE studies; STATISTICAL correlation; DECISION making; FACTOR analysis; GOODNESS-of-fit tests; POPULATION geography; PROBABILITY theory; QUESTIONNAIRES; REGRESSION analysis; RESEARCH evaluation; SCALE analysis (Psychology); SEX distribution; SOCIALIZATION; STATISTICAL hypothesis testing; T-test (Statistics); WORLD Wide Web; CULTURAL values; DATA analysis software; DESCRIPTIVE statistics; ONE-way analysis of variance; PSYCHOLOGY

The current investigation extended past efforts on cultural differences in sport fandom by investigating sport fandom in Qatar, a previously unexplored culture. A sample of 259 sport fans completed a questionnaire packet assessing demographic variables, sport fandom, team identification, impacts of various socialization agents, and six typical sport fan behaviors. The results revealed a number of interesting findings including gender differences (males exhibited both greater levels of identification with a team and sport fandom than females), the influence of team-related factors for selecting a sport team, and a particularly large percentage of foreign teams listed as one's favorite team. To further our understanding of the behavior of sport fans globally and provide insights to sport managers, the results of this research are compared and contrasted with similar studies conducted in Australia, Greece, Norway, U.K., and the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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