lets go baby

hi y’all! here’s the promised summary of that study i was collecting data for a month or two ago- (again, huge thank you to @tavaresfucker for helping distribute it and to everyone who took it!) if you want to read the full study you can find that here. if you don’t want to read 40+ pages, here’s the highlights:

research goal: documenting the existence of what we call “multi-team fans” (aka fans who follow multiple teams within the same league). we wanted to do this by comparing them to more traditional “single-team fans” in terms of consumption, age, and gender. we also wanted to see how level of loyalty changes or remains the same between teams for multi-team fans.

methods: we used the sports spectator identification scale, which has a cronbach’s alpha of .915 and has been relatively widely used in the field. we also had a variety of questions about how people consumed sports media and products over the past 24 months, plus demographics questions.

results:

multi-team fans (m = 6.06) have a significantly higher level of loyalty to their “team A” as compared to single-team fans (m = 5.27), t (148) = -3.12, p < .001.

for consumption, the only statistically significant finding was that single-team (m = 4.64) fans bough more miscellaneous merchandise than multi-team fans (m = 1.53), t (148) = 1.14, p < .05. there were no significant differences in number of games streamed or attended, of jerseys purchased, of branded clothing items purchased, or of number of season ticket holders.

there were no significant differences in gender.  88.5% of single-team fans were female, 6.5% were male, 3.3% were nonbinary, and 1.6% self-reported another identity. multi-team fans were 76.4% female, 6.7% male, 12.2% nonbinary, and 4.5% reported another identity, X2 (N = 150, df = 4) = 6.64, p < .16.

there were no significant differences in age. 90.1% of single-team fans were 18 - 34. 87.7% of multi-team fans were 18 - 34, X2 (N = 150, df = 5) = 5.44, p < .36.

for multi-team fans, level of loyalty to team A (m = 6.86, sd = .82) is statistically significantly higher than teams B - E. loyalty to teams B (m = 4.99, sd = 1.8) and C (m = 4.34, sd = 1.5)are not significantly different from each other, but are from teams A, D, and E. similarly, teams D (m = 3.56, sd = 1.61) and E (m = 3.26, sd = 1.46) are not significantly different from each other, but are from teams A, B, and C,  wilks’ 𝜆 = .11, F (4, 10) = 20, p < .001.

limitations:

we may have just measured how millennial/gen z women consume sports

covid may have impacted consumption

people may not accurately recall their consumption

imperfect survey

on the other hand it was a little funny to realize 1 it is father’s day and 2 this is my to-do list rn