Abstract
Volleyball currently faces many difficulties in Japan. In particular, the acquisition of people involved in volleyball is one of the most important and urgent tasks. Attractiveness has been considered as a contributing factor to increase involvement in sports. For popularization and advancement of volleyball in Japan, we attempted to clarify the attractiveness of volleyball. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine and visualize the attractions of volleyball. Through an open-ended questionnaire survey, data regarding the attractions of volleyball were collected from 77 university students (45 males, 32 females; average age 20.68 ± 0.68 years) who took a sports science class using volleyball.
A qualitative analysis was conducted to extract the attractiveness features of volleyball, which were categorized based on the closeness of response meanings using the KJ method. Two hundred and sixty-eight valid responses that were obtained from the survey were mainly classified into six categories: “team sport,” “specific playing structure,” “playing,” “spectating,” “interaction with other persons” and “outcome for affection.” Results indicated that the participants involved in volleyball understood the six attractions, and which were connected to each other. Additionally, this suggested that transmitting the attractions will be a motivation for starting and continuing involvement in volleyball. Therefore, we should aim to discover further attractive inherent characteristics of volleyball by refining the six attractions. This will not only
help solve the various tasks, but also increase involvement in volleyball and advance the value of the sport.
