Fanship scale development

Abstract

Fanship is known as the connection an individual has with a fan object (e.g., celebrity, film, sports team, etc). Through this connection, individuals are able to build relationships, create social change, enact attitude/behavioral change, and much more. Researchers have started to explore the concept of fanship; the majority of studies focus on fanship in a critical or interpretive approach. While these types of research are important and needed for the field of literature, studies have not explored the aspects in a post-positivist style approach. This is the main rationale for the current dissertation. The focus of this dissertation is to create a scale to measure fanship. The first goal of this dissertation was to understand the construct of fanship. While literature has explored the concepts of fanship and fandom, these theoretically similar yet different terms have become conflated. This dissertation attempts to define each concept in its own clear entity. From that point, the dissertation uses scale development to create measurement items that point to the construct of fanship. These items are then run through validation processes (e.g., convergent validation evidence) and collected data to run statistical tests (e.g., confirmatory factor analysis) to result in a fanship scale. Through the three study processes, a total of 913 participants participated within this dissertation. The dissertation was open to all types of fan objects, and throughout all the participants, the results obtained a wide range of fan objects (e.g., Taylor Swift, University of Texas Longhorns, Marvel). The result of this dissertation is an 18-items fanship scale that has five dimensions: 1) fan emotional/affective ties, 2) fan knowledge, 3) fan community, 4) fan engagement, and 5) fan conversation. The final and fifth dimension is one that is a result of the study’s findings to expand the field of fan studies research. Furthermore, this scale moves the research from a transferable, interpretive, critical standpoint to more of a predictive and generalizability viewpoint. Both critical and interpretive fan studies research is crucial to the literature, but so is moving fan studies into more post-positivist ideas. By expanding the fan studies research to the post-positive paradigm, research can start to understand fan studies in a new viewpoint. This fanship scale can be used to assist future research in the method of prediction of fanship influence, as well as understanding more of the workings of fanship, such as how types of fans (e.g., sports fans compared to film fans) display their fanship. This current dissertation has a large focus on fanship itself. However, while being a scale development, a significant amount of this dissertation speaks to methodological approaches and validation evidence used to help make the fanship scale a valid and reliable scale. The results of this dissertation add to the field in many ways, from not only creating a scale itself, along with the results found within the scale development itself (e.g., discussing a new and fifth continuum), but also to taking steps in expanding fan studies into a new light.