Examining Relationships among Sport Participation, Spectatorship, and SportLottery Purchase

[[abstract]]This study attempts to investigate the relationships among sport participation, sport spectatorship, and sport lottery purchase. It is hypothesized that sport spectatorship fully mediated the relationship between sport participation and lottery purchase. If there exist the direct relationship between sport spectatorship and sport lottery purchase and indirect relationship between sport participation and sport lottery purchase, it might be feasible, for example, to advertise sport lottery in sporting events including sport spectatorship and participation. The current study hypothesizes that a positive relationship exists between watching sports and sport lottery purchase. Since prior studies suggested that sport participation positively related to sport spectatorship (Gau & Woodside, 2014), this study also hypothesized that sport spectatorship played a mediating role between sport participation and lottery purchase. This study was part of a nation-wide research project conducted by the Gallup company and funded by Sports Administration, Ministry of Education, in Taiwan. Participants were recruited from lottery shops around Taiwan to answer three types of questions: 1. Sport participation: Frequency, duration, and strength; 2. Sport spectatorship: Watching frequency and level of self-agreement as a sport fan; 3. Sport lottery purchase: Money. Correlation analyses show that sport participation is weakly related to sport spectatorship, but not related to sport lottery purchase. Sport spectatorship in terms of watching frequency is moderately related to sport lottery purchase. Two hypotheses were basically supported