Thesis
College football fans: materials, ideas, values, and rituals
Washington State University
Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
2012
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/101226
Abstract
Every weekend in the fall millions of college football fans around the United States gather at football stadiums or around their televisions to watch their favorite college football team compete. Many of these fans can be described as devoted and fanatical fans. Twenty devoted and fanatical college football fans from the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest participated in semi-structured interviews to explore the meanings and behaviors associated with their individual and collective sports consumption practices. For analysis, open coding, axial coding, and selective coding were conducted to determine three major themes within the data. The findings from this study can be organized into three major categories: materials, ideas and values, and behaviors. Materials, describes the deeper meanings associated with the participant's own team materials. Participants developed meanings and connections with their own materials in four different ways: by becoming superstitious about what they wear on game days, nostalgic towards their team materials, refusing to dispose of these materials, and incorporating their identity with these materials. The ideas and values surrounding individual fans' fandom comes from the pride and loyalty they display for their favorite college football team and their views of non-members. Both help a fan to develop their own ideas and values about their fandom. Behaviors observed and reported by participants can be described as ritualistic patterns of behavior. These behaviors can be conducted by individual fans, in small groups of 15-30 fans while staging, or as a crowd of tens of thousands of fans at the stadium. The findings in this study unveiled that the social context seen among college football fans is unique and different from the previous research conducted on communities. Therefore, the researchers concluded that culture is a better frame to define consumption practices of college football fans.
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Details
- Title
- College football fans
- Creators
- Ashley Marie Fedrigo Hayes
- Contributors
- Yoon Jin Kwon (Degree Supervisor)Karen K. Leonas (Degree Supervisor)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Apparel, Merchandising, Design and Textiles, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University; [Pullman, Washington] :
- Identifiers
- 99900525298501842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Thesis