Sports and Spectators: Intra-audience Effects

Abstract

Crowd behavior and spectators7 reactions to each other contribute to the entertainment and involvement that result from watching sports at the stadium.Why would anyone attend a football game when he or she could stay at home and watch it on television? Football lends itself to television. The variety of camera angles used during a single broadcast allows a viewer to see all aspects of the game from a better vantage point than had he or she been in the best seats in the stadium. Instant replays offer the viewer a chance to see spectacular or complicated plays over and over again. Furthermore, stadium attendance itself has a number of drawbacks. At the football stadium in Athens, Georgia, for example, they do not sell beer, the hot dogs are cold, and the seats are hard benches. Yet, I am forced to report that, in spite of the fact that the game was televised, I attended the Georgia-South Carolina football game in the fall of 1980 in person. Why? The answer to this question lies in an analysis of those factors that make in-person sports spectatorship a distinctly different experience from TV sports viewing-factors that can be considered as "intra-audience effects." Williams (25) makes a distinction between the "game event, defined as the action taking place on the field plus directly related activities taking place on the sidelines, and the stadium event, defined as the total sequence of activities occurring in the stadium, both perceived and participated in by the fans and including the game event" (p. 135). In this article I will argue that an important component of the "stadium event" is crowd behavior and that the reactions spectators have to other spectators is a major factor contributing to the excitement, the arousal, John E.

Sports Spectators' Suspense: Affect and Uncertainty in Sports Entertainment

“…In the next step, Equation 1a and 1b were rewritten to include the explanatory variables that were derived from suspense theory. As mentioned before, gender (see Gan et al, 1997; Gantz & Wenner, 1991; Sargent, Zillmann, & Weaver, 1998) and whether the game was watched alone (Hocking, 1982) served as control variables. …”

Something for nothing: the free ticket myth

“…In contrast, over two-thirds of paying customers either came individually or with a sole partner. Communal experience as a motivator for sports stadium attendance is thus affirmed (Hocking, 1982;DeSerpa and Faith, 1996), and it is not inconsistent to infer that group attendance may also mitigate the perceived risk of free ticket redemption, and stimulate secondary purchase intentions (Ho and Gallagher, 2005). Finally, as previously mentioned, the Friday evening greyhound meetings had a higher quality of contest, and were no doubt more convenient for patrons to attend than the Monday lunchtime events.…”

Epideictic rhetoric and baseball: Nurturing community through controversy

“…7 The majority of studies that have been published, from a communication perspective, have focused primarily on media and sports. See: Bryan, Brown, Comisky, and Zillmann (1982); Bryant, Comisky, and Zillmann (1981); Duncan and Brummett (1987); Farrell (1989); Gantz (1981); Hocking (1982); Kruse (1981); MacAloon (1989);McDermott, Hocking, Johnson, and Atkin (1989); Morris and Nydahl (1983); Prisuta (1979); Reid and Soley (1979); Rothenbuhler (1989); Trujillo and Ekdom (1985). See also the special section in the Summer 1977 issue of Journalism Quarterly.…”