Abstract
Scandal in sport is defined as “doing something illegal or immoral that has a profound impact on the sport or contest.” Previous studies have revealed that scandals negatively influence an organization’s reputation. Researchers noted that individuals and organizations are motivated to present an image defense when a reputation is threatened. In other words, the reputation is closely related to organizations’ images, and try to recover images through diverse image repair strategies when reputation is damaged. Despite scandals in college athletics severely deteriorate university reputation, there have been minimal studies regarding how universities should respond to those athletic scandals to recover tarnished reputation. Therefore, this study aims to examine how college students perceive scandals in college athletics and how different types of image repair strategy positively affect restoring university reputation after the college athletics scandals. An online experimental survey will be conducted to examine the effects of image repair strategies on scandals in college athletics. Subjects will be college students who have attended in college athletic events in past two years. More than 200 experiment subjects will be recruited online and the data will be analyzed using multivariate analyses, including multivariate analysis of variance and factor analysis. The findings of the study will provide college administrators with practical information regarding effective response strategies for universities to recover their reputation tarnished by athletic scandals.
Presenters
Geumchan HwangAssistant Professor, Human Performance and Health Education, Western Michigan University, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
Sports Management & Commercialization
KEYWORDS
Scandals, College Athletics, Image Repair, University Reputation, Management
