Dimensions of general market demand associated with professional team sports: Development of a scale

The purpose of this study was to develop the Scale of Market Demand to assess general market demand factors affecting the consumption of professional team sports, which was completed through the following five steps: (a) formulation of a theoretical framework, (b) development of a preliminary scale, (c) exploratory factor analysis (EFA), (d) confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and (e) examination of predictive validity through conducting a structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis. Following a community intercept method, professional sport consumers (N = 453) in four southeastern metropolitan areas responded to the scale. Data were randomly split into two halves: one for EFA and the other for CFA. In the EFA with alpha extraction and promax rotation, six factors with 31 items emerged: opposing team, home team, game promotion, economic consideration, sport epitome, and schedule convenience. In the CFA with maximum likelihood estimation, five factors with 17 most pertinent items were retained, without the sport epitome factor. This five-factor model displayed good fit to the data, discriminant validity, and high reliability. The SEM revealed that home team, opposing team, and game promotion were predictive of game re-attendance behaviour.