There has been a discussion of whether electronic sporting (cyber sport) could be one of the sporting forms along with other competitions (Ermi et al., 2005). While marketing and technology were essential in the framework of developing cyber sport games, culture differences and perceptions of people toward cyber sports must be considered. There is a dearth of study to explore perceptual differences affected by culture and ethnic background of people in existing literature. The purpose of this study was to examine whether ethnicity would be an important variable to influence their perceptions toward cyber sports.
Method:
A survey was administered to differentiate perceptions of the cyber sports among the students in the United States. The participants (N= 336) were college students from the east coast of America and voluntarily took part in the study. The Inventory of Perception for E-Sports (IPES) with acceptable validities and reliabilities was used as the instrument that contains 19 perceptual questions clustered into the five factors (Attraction, Economics, Recognition, Socialization and Technique). MANOVA was utilized to examine if there would be a significant difference on the mean vectors across the ethnicity groups and followed by ANOVAs and Post hoc Scheff tests.
Analysis/Results:
A significant difference (Λ= .85, F = .3.00, p < .01) was found in MANOVA on the mean vectors among the three ethnic groups. Follow-up ANOVAs indicated significant differences on the factor of Economics (F = 4.38, p < .05), Recognition (F = 9.15, p < .01), and Technique (F = 4.23, p < .01). Post hoc Scheff tests further explored that the Asian group scored significantly higher than the Caucasian group (M = 4.35 vs. M = 3.61) on the factor of Economics. The Asian group rated significantly higher than both the Caucasian group (M = 4.18 vs. M = 3.04) and African America group (M = 4.18 vs. M = 3.52) on the factor of Recognition. In addition, the Asian group scored significantly higher than the African American group (M = 4.60 vs. M= 3.87) on the factor of Technique.
Conclusions:
Asian students demonstrated more positive perceptions than other ethnic students toward cyber sports regarding characteristics of the play, economic impact by the cyber sports, and technical competence required for the advanced online competition. The researchers of this study provided a quantitative evidence to support the conceptual framework of human perception that could be affected by diverse culture and ethnic backgrounds of individuals.