An Exploration of the Construct of Psychological Attachment to a Sport Team among College Students: A Multidimensional Approach

Abstract

There have been several attempts to measure sport consumers’ level of attachment toward their favorite sport teams; consequently, a number of different terms have been coined to represent the corresponding psychosocial constructs. However, a shortcoming of previously developed scales has been the lack of synchronization of the title of the scales and the content of the items contained therein. Moreover, many of the previous scales were designed to measure a single aspect of the complex nature of sport consumers’ psychological attachment to sport teams. To address some of weaknesses of previous research, this investigation (through two related studies) sought to employ a multidimensional approach to synthesize and develop a scale with a manageable number of items to measures three related psychosocial constructs associated with psychological attachment to sport teams. The results enabled the researchers to locate the origin of sport consumers’ psychological attachment to a university's sport team. An exploratory factor analysis indicated that the nine items were divided into three factors as proposed and the three latent constructs explained 83.3% of the total variance of psychological attachment of college students to university athletic teams.