Motives to Attend Sporting Events

Discuss about the Motives, Satisfaction and Intention to Revisit Gold Coast.
 

Sporting events have gained popularity and being held worldwide since the past decades. In the hosting countries, local markets seem to have boost due to the increased demand from the large number of visitors from all countries across the world Kavetsos & Szymanski (2010). Variety of products (fruits and other ready for consumption products) get increased number of sales which is contributed to by both the players and spectators. The major focus of this research study was to determine the sporting events’ understanding of motives, satisfaction and the intentions to revisit the Gold Coast. The worldwide sporting events are attended by people with different motives such as networking and socializing, shows during the halftime, for promotions and giveaways, gaining or giving impression to people around and also the team spirit (for players) Stavros, Meng, Westberg & Farrelly (2014).  Opinions of people in regards to their level of satisfaction vary due to a number of things that can either make them wish to revisit the place or never to revisit the place some other time in the future. Such factors could be unfriendly environment, boredom, weather hostility, lack of visitors’ favorite delicacies among other factors.

The general objective to be met in this research was to evaluate the understanding of sporting events on motives, satisfaction and intention to revisit Gold Coast. 

1. To evaluate the demographic profit of visitors to the games in April, 2018
2. To determine the most important motives to the games and their significance difference between domestic and international visitors
3. To determine the correlation between visitors’ satisfaction and intentions to return

Motivation can be referred to as representation of the activated internal states that results to arousal, direction and leading to behavior change of a person Mega, Ronconi & De Beni, (2014); Blackwell & Pinder, (2014). Some emotional responses are subjective and such include vicarious achievements, excitement, fantasies, having social interactions and affiliation by groups Aron et al., (2015). Consequently, people could attend sporting events with the aim of gaining or creating impression to others. Studies reveal that most of the researches give seldom report on the game attendance behavior Osti, Disegna & Brida (2012). When it comes to the measure of motivation to engage in leisurely activities, their measure could in four different dimensions which include escape, mastery, competency and lastly socialization Neale & Funk (2006); Wann, Schrader & Wilson (1999).

Further in this research, the motivational content facets such as the performance, excitement, socialization diversion and esteem are the representatives to be conceptualized through spectator motivation. These are the parsimonious group of motives that invoke people’s attendance to the sporting events from the previous researches Yoshida, Gordon, Nakazawa & Biscaia (2014). Satisfaction of the needs of the attendees is accompanied by some benefits particularly arising from the group of motives Lee, Seo, & Green (2013); Funk, Filo, Beaton & Pritchard (2009). The acronym SPEED is used in the representation of the major motivational themes that have been aforementioned in the group of motives. Socialization can be explained as the interpersonal aspect of sport representing the need for sociability and giving the degree to which an individual attends sporting events with the intention of interacting with families, friends and better proportion of the spectators Thomas, & Blackmon (2015). Performance is the measure of the extent to which the attendees believe that sporting events results to beauty, excellence and creativity of the athletic performance Sarkar, Fletcher & Brown, (2015); Könecke & Kwiatkowski (2016). In regards to that, excitement is the perceived stimulation from sporting events through experience of the spectators Yoshida, Heere & Gordon (2015). Esteem gives the degree an individual perceives attending sporting events as means of providing opportunities for various achievements Herstein & Berger (2013).  

Satisfaction with Sporting Events

1. What is the demographic profile of visitors to the Games in April, 2018?
2. What are the most important motives to the games and are there significance difference between the domestic and international visitors?
3. Is there any correlation between visitors’ satisfaction and intention to return?

This part will give the approaches that were taken in the data collection process and the instruments used for the same. The targeted population of this research was about over 10,000 attendees at the Gold Coast where the probabilistic approach was employed in the sampling process. The attendees (spectators) at the gold coast were randomly selected to take part in the attending to the self-administered questionnaires to express their views in relation to the questions’ demands. Seven items with five Likert scaled questions were used where the respondents were to choose their levels of agreement, satisfaction and certainty in regards to the sporting events at Gold Coast. Simple random sampling technique was employed by the researcher in the selection of a sample of 100 participants who completely filled the questionnaires.  Quantitative data was preferable in this research since the main objectives of this research was to give inferential results that could be tangible and dependable.

For data analysis, the collected data were organized, entered into excel and cleaned in preparation of the data analysis process. Frequency statistics was used in the representation of the categorical data for easy understanding and interpretations. For the test of correlation between the variables, Pearson correlation coefficient was used. Furthermore, t-test was carried out to determine the existing differences in motives between domestic and international tourists. 

The attendees with the age 18-30 years at the Gold Coast were represented by 36%, 31-40 years were represented by 40%, 41-50 years were represented by 12%, 51-60 years were represented by 8%, 61-70 years were represented by 2% and finally, the oldest of the attendees with 70+ years were represented by 2%. From the results, the highly represented spectators were of the age 31-40 with (40%) then closely followed by 18-30 with (36%) years, this could be due to the youths’ physical strength and excitement for the sport with low representation from the elderly ones with only 2% due to their reduced enthusiasm for sports. The female spectators could be said to have outnumbered the male spectators as represented by 54% and 46% respectively, this showed that females loved sports than males. Sporting events were seen to have attracted people with different income range as $0-$50,000 were represented by 35% of the whole respondents, the spectators whose income was $50,001-$100,000 were represented by 22%, those who had income of $100,001-$150,000 were represented by 19% and lastly, those whose income was $150,000+ were represented by 24%. From these results, it seems ironical that those people with the lowest income were the ones who dominated the sports ground at the Gold Coast since they were highly represented (35%) compared to any other group in the randomly selected sample. Coming to the relationship status of the respondents, those who were currently single by the time of the sporting event at the Gold Coast were represented by 9%. The de facto group was represented by 16%. Married people who attended the sporting activity at the Gold Coast as from the sample were 39% and those in relationship were represented by 36% with the domestic tourists dominating the sports ground as they were represented by 56% against the international tourists who were represented by 44%.

Data Collection and Analysis

From this, it is clear that sport events are highly attended by the married and those who were in relationship since these are the two groups that were highly represented with least attendance from the single people. 

This table shows the mean and standard deviation of different motives and intention to return to Gold Coast.

Table 2

Satisfaction was the strongest motive for the whole sample with (M=4.04; SD=0.94), domestic also experienced the same effect of its highest motive being satisfaction with (M=4.20; SD=0.88) and that for the international tourists also being satisfaction with (M=3.91; SD=0.98). The weakest motive from the sample was the intention to return with the whole sample recording (M=3.13; SD=1.30).  For the domestic tourists, the weakest motive was excitement from the sporting events at Gold Coast with (M=3.00; SD=1.28) and finally, that of the international tourists the intention to return with (M=2.54; SD=1.08). The case was different with the weakest motives which kept changing in the whole sample. For domestic tourists, their weakest motive was excitement to mean that they were never excited as much as the international visitors were hence recorded smallest mean with the greatest standard deviation as compared to the rest of the motives.

Lastly, for the international visitors, their weakest motive was intention to return which recorded the lowest mean implying that their chances of returning to Gold coast was low  even though they were excited and had fun and satisfied. The case was different on the same for domestic visitors’ intention to return since it recorded relatively greater mean with relatively smaller standard deviation (i.e. 3.89 and 1.17) respectively. That was to mean that domestic visitors were most likely to return to Gold Coast than the international visitors.

The t-test was conducted to check for the significant difference existing between motives for the domestic tourists and the international tourists. In regards to that test, (p=0.003) showed that difference existed in socialization between the domestic tourists and international tourists. This could be as a result that the domestic visitors were familiar with the place thus they could easily socialize than the international visitors. There was also significance difference in the performance between the domestic visitors and the international visitors since (p=0.004). Excitement between the domestic tourists and the international tourists showed some significant difference since (p=0.001). Finally, the intention to return to Gold Coast also showed to there being significant difference between domestic tourists and the international tourists since (P<0.05) as in table 2. 

Demographics of Sporting Event Attendees

Correlation was the test conducted to check for the strength of relationship that existed between satisfaction and intension to revisit Gold Coast for the two levels of tourist groups (domestic and international) tourists. Correlation coefficient between satisfaction of both groups of visitors and their intention to revisit Gold Coast was (r=0.01). This display showed a very weak positive correlation between the two variables for the two groups in the sample since the value was too small and closer to zero. If the value is made negligible, then it could be concluded that no correlation existed between satisfaction and future intension to revisit Gold Cost for the two groups of tourists. Correlation coefficient between satisfaction and domestic tourists’ intention to revisit Gold Coast was (r=-0.23) which showed a weak negative relationship. Finally, the correlation between satisfaction of the international tourists and their intention to revisit Gold Coast was (r=0.03), which showed a very weak positive correlation.

Conclusion

From the results in this research, it can be concluded that females loved the sporting activities than their male counterpart. Most of the spectators were seen to those whose ages were either forty or below. Among the motives tested, the strongest of them all in all groups of tourists (domestic and international) was satisfaction whereas the weakest motives varied between the groups with domestic tourists having posting excitement and the international tourists posting intention to return. Significant difference existed between a number of motives such as socialization for the domestic and international tourists, performance, excitement and the intention to revisit Gold Coast between domestic and international tourists. Weak positive correlation existed between satisfaction and intention of the international tourists to revisit Gold Coast whereas negative correlation existed between satisfaction and their intention to revisit Gold Coast.

1. It is recommended that in the future, demographic profile of the attendees be thoroughly evaluated.
2. It is also recommended that other motives be determined and their significant differences be made clear for both groups (domestic and international tourists).
3. The future management should bank their efforts on the possible existence of relationship between satisfaction and the intention of the visitors to revisit the place of the event.

This study was basically based and focused on meeting three objectives which were not limited to evaluation of the demographic information of those people visiting the places where games are played, to determine some of the most important motives and their significance between the domestic visitors and international visitors and lastly the study was as well aimed at determining the relationship in satisfaction of the visitors and their intention to return to the hosting place. This did not capture what could be steering the return of visitors to the place or never to return at all any other time in future. The factors resulting to the variation in levels of satisfaction of both domestic and international visitors was not discussed in this report. The future research should therefore focus in revealing the factors leading to variation in the levels of satisfaction of the visitors in case of the sporting events. 

Results of the Study

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