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Abstract
Artistic entertainment has been a fundamental part of live sporting events for nearly a century, serving to engage spectators, provide pleasure, and enrich the overall event experience. Despite its long-standing presence, the mechanisms of artistic entertainment in contemporary sports remain underexplored. As the sport industry evolves, understanding the influence of Sports-related Artistic Entertainment (SAE) on spectators’ experiences is crucial for event managers seeking to boost attendance and enhance the overall game experience. This dissertation explored the influence of SAE on sport spectators’ experiences, aiming to develop and validate a measurement scale for assessing the SAE quality, understand how SAE influences spectators’ game-day and in-stadium experiences, and examine how these experiences differ among different spectator groups.
Through the lenses of the Self-Determination Theory (SDT), the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) model, and the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), this research demonstrated that incorporating artistic entertainment into live sporting events represents a significant opportunity to enhance spectator experiences and foster long-term engagement. The measurement scale and structural models developed and tested in this study offered a reliable and valid instrument for understanding and assessing the extent to which artistic entertainment influences sport spectators’ live experiences and consumption behavioral intentions, thereby providing practitioners and academics with a means to effectively use artistic elements to enhance game-day and in-stadium services and atmospheres when they become intertwined with sporting events. The findings also contributed to the expanding body of literature on event management and emphasized the benefits and necessity of understanding artistic entertainment programming for live sporting events in a more nuanced way.
Through the lenses of the Self-Determination Theory (SDT), the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) model, and the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), this research demonstrated that incorporating artistic entertainment into live sporting events represents a significant opportunity to enhance spectator experiences and foster long-term engagement. The measurement scale and structural models developed and tested in this study offered a reliable and valid instrument for understanding and assessing the extent to which artistic entertainment influences sport spectators’ live experiences and consumption behavioral intentions, thereby providing practitioners and academics with a means to effectively use artistic elements to enhance game-day and in-stadium services and atmospheres when they become intertwined with sporting events. The findings also contributed to the expanding body of literature on event management and emphasized the benefits and necessity of understanding artistic entertainment programming for live sporting events in a more nuanced way.