Host Population Perceptions Of Sporting Events

The purpose of this research was to investigate perceptions of people who live around The Rajamangala National Stadium regarding sporting events impact on the community. The Rajamangala National Stadium is the national stadium of Thailand and the home stadium for the Thailand national football team. It is part of the HuaMak Sports Complex, locate in HuaMak Subdistrict, BangKapi, Bangkok. Host population perceptions were measured through a two-page self-completed questionnaire written in Thai, administered to a sample of 400 residents of the district of Bangkapi (population 67,931 members) in Bangkok, Thailand. Resident questionnaires were distributed within 2 months, August ? October 2017. The questionnaire comprised 27 questions. The first part aimed to identify awareness of event being staged. The second part contained 2 Open ended questions designed to find out how sporting event effect community, positive and negative impacts, with 8 items measure of residents? perceptions of impact. These items related to personal quality of life, quality of life of community, sense of community and community pride. The final part included questions relate to involvement characteristics of respondents; attend sporting events in year 2017 or previous years, level of interest in event, type of involvement in event by respondent or household member, distance from house, and socio-demographic data. Once collected, all data were entered into SPSS version 15.0 for further analysis. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the subjects and the perceived impacts of sporting events. Because of qualitative approach, the findings were described the central position of a frequency distribution for a group of data by mode. Mode is the number that occurs most often in a set of numbers. The results presented by descriptive with percentage in the form of tables, and text. We found both positive and negative impacts of sporting events performance on the community. The findings were identified as seven main positive impacts and six main negative impacts. These impacts related to economic, social and environmental of the community. The directions for future sporting events research on environmental studies: impact and evaluation studies including sustainability and greening of sporting events such as reducing garbage. More research on consequences of sporting events effect local culture community.