Abstract
The purpose of this research was to establish a model to quantitatively capture the changes in time series of a domestic public opinion toward the Japanese representative athletes in international sports events for the top athlete management. The Beijing Olympics, held in August 2008, was thought to offer one of the best cases to carry out this approach. As a result, extracting six evaluation patterns by comparing the social involvement levels between opening and closing of the Olympic games has been succeeded. The theoretical novelty of this research extends the Expectaion-Confirmation/Disconfirmation Model from a “consumer” analysis to a Japanese “society” analysis.
The six evaluation patterns are: 1.Excessive Expectation type, 2.Preceded Expectation type, 3.Predetermined Harmony type, 4.Perfect type, 5.Satisfied after Viewing type, and 6. Impressed after Viewing type. The following findings were obtained from considerations of the results above. Among athletes with high performance, their expectations are high (Type 1) . Sports without highly expected players might face industrial reduction in the future (Type 2) . There are peculiar evaluation aspects in regard to female athletes (Type 3) . The scarcity of athletes who have both high expectations and good results (Type 4) . The difficulty of continuing social involvement for athletes (Type 5) . The possibility of expanding social involvement rapidly, and the problems of concentrating social concern towards particular players (Type 6) .
Thus, the effectiveness of the Social Expectation-Confirmation/Disconfirmation Model has been shown. However, this result might be a special case limited to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Our future task is to apply this method to other Olympic games including the winter games and other international games. This is because it is necessary to accumulate a large number of cases in order to improve the method generally.
