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Social media education provided by national governing bodies of sport: an examination of practices for Youth Olympic Games and Olympic Games athletes
Social media provides athletes with many opportunities as well as challenges. Scholars have argued for proactive, educational social media training instead of traditional policy and punishment models, yet research on this topic is limited. Therefore, this study sought to understand the social media training/education national governing bodies (NGBs) provided to athletes ranging from Youth Olympic Games (YOG) to Olympic level, and to examine NGB communication employees’ perceptions regarding athletes’ social media use and their organization’s social media training. Utilizing uses and gratifications theory, a sequential mixed method was employed involving a survey of U.S. NGBs and in-depth interviews with NGB communication personnel. While most NGBs used proactive, educational social media training for Olympic athletes, few did the same for YOG athletes. NGB employees felt social media use posed significant benefits or gratifications to athletes, and education and training helped to enhance those benefits as well as minimize the challenges, or failed gratifications, athletes experience on social media.
History
School
- Loughborough University London
Published in
Communication and SportVolume
11Issue
2Pages
238-264Publisher
SAGE PublicationsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The authorsPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Sage under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Acceptance date
2021-09-28Publication date
2021-12-08Copyright date
2021ISSN
2167-4795eISSN
2167-4809Publisher version
Language
- en