Socio-Cultural Impacts of Professional Football Clubs on Local Residents: Developing and Validation of Measurement Scale in Vietnam

Football is the most popular sport in Vietnam, and this is not just a game or sports, it makes a role as nationalism, and football also is viral motivation to push up the development of socio-economic in Vietnam. To date, the majority of existing studies have focused upon the wider economic impacts, with few empirical studies of the social or cultural impacts upon local residents from professional football.

The paper aims to develop and validate the scale of socio-cultural impacts to examine the perceptions of local residents from professional football clubs in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Before using questionnaire for conducting the scale of socio-cultural impacts to reach participants, structure and content validity of preliminary questionnaire is assessed by a panel of experts with using the test of Item-Objective Congruence. In addition, the reliability test for the draft questionnaire also conducted via the thirty university’s students. Data were collected from 1,500 local residents were based on a convenience sample from six cities and provinces of the three regions in Vietnam. After collecting the data, the entire data set was randomly split into two parts for exploratory factor analysis by IBM SPSS version 22.0 and confirmatory factor analysis by LISREL 9.30 in order to confirm the factor structure of the scale of socio-cultural impacts.

Results of the exploratory factor analysis identified the four impact factors including three positive socio-cultural impacts as Community Enhancement and Consolidation, Health and Socio-cultural Opportunities, and Economics Benefits; and one negative socio-cultural impacts as Socio-cultural & Environment Concerns with a total variance of 62.76%. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that after adjusting model, the 4-factor with 37-item model provided a good fit to the data with the index of χ2/df = 0.343 with P-value > 0.05; RMSEA = 0.000; SRMR = 0.003; GFI = 1.000; and AGFI = 0.998.

It is concluded that the Scale of Socio-Cultural Impacts (SSCI) is a valid measuring instrument for assessing perception of local residents on socio-cultural impacts from professional football clubs at their community in Vietnam.