Are Multiple Points of Attachment Necessary to Predict Cognitive, Affective, Conative, or Behavioral Loyalty?

Abstract

Team identification has been shown to predict cognitive, affective, conative, and behavioural dimensions of sport spectatorship. Recently, the Point of Attachment Index was introduced as a comprehensive measure of a sport fan's different points of attachment within sport. The PAI, as studied here, is composed of six different points of attachment (i.e., team, players, coach, sport, university, and level of sport). The primary focus of this study was to determine whether fewer subscales from the Points of Attachment Index would satisfactorily predict cognitive, affective, conative, and behavioural dimensions of sport spectatorship. Data were collected from 358 university students (154 male, 204 female. The attachment to the team subscale explained a significant and meaningful amount of variance in BIRGing, satisfaction, conative loyalty, and attendance behaviour. Three of the other subscales (university, level, and coach), when added into each of the regression equations, explained a small but statistically significant amount of the remaining variance.