An Investigation of the Role of Sport Mass Media on the Formation of Social Behaviors of Professional Athletes in Iran

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of mass media on social behaviors formation in Iranian professional athletes. The research used a mixed exploratory sequence for data collection. In the qualitative stage, semi-structured interviews with 23 professional athletes, coaches, managers, psychologists and sport sociologists and sport media specialists were used to collect data. The research sample was selected by purposive sampling method and snowball technique. In the qualitative stage, the data were analyzed through coding method in three stages: open, axial and selective, and the findings included 81 tokens in open coding which were classified in the form of 11 concepts in axial coding. In the selective coding stage, mass media components which played an effective role in forming the social behaviors of professional athletes were modeled. In the quantitative stage, the sample consisted of 220 subjects who were selected by stratified random sampling method. A researcher-made questionnaire was used in the quantitative stage. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses by the SPSS20 and AMOS were used to evaluate the research model. The results of the research model test showed that according to the goodness fitness index (GFI)=0.924, the model of the role of sport mass media in forming the social behaviors of professional athletes in Iran had a good fit.