Article ID: 2025-3
The psychological states of enthusiastic sport consumers have been explained by various psychological constructs such as team identification and fan community identification. The purpose of this research is to confirm the statistical discriminability of the four sports consumer identifications. Specifically, this study was conducted from two approaches: (1) an evaluation using three methods to test the discriminant validity of the constructs, and (2) an examination using behavioral loyalty as the criterion variable. As a result of the validation of the study on consumers regarding the teams of their residential area in the Koshien baseball tournament (n=754), there were no issues with the discriminant validity of fan community identification and local city identification, however, there was a problem of discriminant validity between the two team identifications (group team identification and role team identification). In addition, the test of the relationship with the criterion variable (behavioral loyalty) using structural equation modeling did not confirm a statistically significant effect of group team identification, which should theoretically have a significant positive relationship. This study contributes to the theoretical development by testing the theory of the discrimination of sport consumer identification confirmed in previous research in other contexts. The findings of this study have implications for future research that attempts to deal with multiple sport consumer identities.
