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Our main purpose in this study was to develop a sports fan ethnocentrism (SFE) scale and test whether or not SFE impacts sports viewing motivations and behaviors. First, 3 rounds of the Delphi technique (Gupta & Clarke, 1996) were applied to develop items for the scale. Then, using quota sampling by region, gender, and age we obtained 900 valid surveys from Major League Baseball (MLB) viewers in Taiwan. We then conducted structural equation modeling with viewing time and motivations to confirm construct validity. The characteristics of Taiwanese SFE were found to be as follows: a) SFE is a positive common value in spectator sports that support local athletes; b) Taiwanese MLB viewers generally possess SFE; and c) SFE had an indirect impact on viewing behavior via interest in sports. The results illustrated positive aspects of SFE and suggest that fans may support their own team without feeling hostility toward those from other countries.
Keywords: sports fan, ethnocentrism, baseball, Taiwan, television, television sports programs.
Ethnocentrism entails a sense of ethnic superiority; it is a value reflecting the collective culture. Sumner (1906) first proposed this sociological notion to distinguish ingroups and outgroups and it subsequently became a major research construct in social psychology and political science. In social psychology, ethnocentrism is seen as a shared tendency for people to see the groups to which they belong as the center of their universe and to explain other social units in terms of their own groups (Booth, 1979). Ethnocentric persons tend to regard their own ethnic group, race, or nation as superior to other ethnic groups, races, or nations, and tend to look down on die symbols of other groups, although ethnocentrism does not necessarily entail feeling superior to others (Le Vine & Campbell, 1972; Lewis, 1985). In political psychology, ethnocentrism is considered to be a type of nationalism. It has been widely employed in research on discrimination toward nonwhite persons and on fascism and anti-Semitism (Adomo, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950; Jensen, 2004; Kecmanovic, 1996).
In fact, in most early academic research on this subject the focus was on narrow or inappropriate cases of ethnocentrism, such as incidents involving neglecting human rights, racial discrimination, fascism, and cultural chauvinism. As a result, ethnocentrism has frequently been seen as...