Spectators' attitudes toward professional football and volleyball sponsorship by alcohol companies in Thailand.

The purpose of this research was to survey spectators at football and volleyball events so as to garner information as to their perspective of sports sponsorship by alcohol companies in Thailand. A survey instrument was used to elicit relevant responses from spectators who had attended Football Thailand Primer League 2008 and the 1st Asian Men's Cup Volleyball Championship 2008. Participants were asked to indicate their attitudes on a questionnaire. Statistical analyses of the data were undertaken using SPSS for Windows version 16.0. Different statistical analyses were used to accomplish the purposes of this study. First, descriptive statistics were compiled for each of the demographic groups and sport spectator profiles. Second, Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) analysis was performed to examine spectators' attitudes toward sponsorship by alcohol companies for football and volleyball. Significant statistically differences (p<0.05) were found in the data among the spectator groups. A pair-wise Post Hoc Comparison (Bonferroni's) was applied to uncover the source of the differences. One thousand sets of questionnaires were distributed during September and October 2008. The researcher handed out 500 football questionnaires and 500 volleyball questionnaires. After examining all questionnaires, there was a total 886 (88.6%) useful questionnaires retrieved and 144 (11.4%) which were not returned or invalid. The number of returned questionnaires from football spectators was 446 (89.2%) and 54 (10.8%) that were not returned or were invalid. The number of returned questionnaires from volleyball spectators was 440 (88%) and 60 (12%) that were not returned or were invalid. The key findings are that the majority of spectators' attitudes toward alcohol sponsorship was positive, 65.8% supported alcohol sponsorship, 4.2% opposed it and 30.0% respondents were neutral. The results of the statistically significant multivariate test indicated that there were reliable differences between football and volleyball spectators, gender, alcoholic beverage drinkers and non alcoholic beverage drinkers, age groups of spectators, education levels and monthly incomes of spectators.