Other- versus Self-Referenced Social Impacts of Events: Validating a New Scale

Abstract

Publicly funded sport events are partially justified based on positive social impacts. Past research generally measured social impact for a generic and global “other” with claims such as “Events create new friendships in the community”. These other-referenced (OR) social impacts are generally higher pre-event than post-event and are inflated for both methodological and theoretical reasons. In the pre-event period of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games, we empirically tested OR items compared to self-referenced (SR) items, such as “Because of the event, I create new friends in the community” and allowed projection bias to vary between scales. Results of the experiment between an OR-Social Impact Scale (OR-SIS) and a similar SR-SIS confirmed OR-measures to be significantly higher than SR-measures. While artificially inflated OR scores may be useful for event organizers and politicians to gain support for hosting, estimates based on circumscribed self (SR) are a methodologically appropriate measurement of social impact.