Understanding the drivers of safety at major sporting events

Attendees perceived safety is a key determinant of attendance at sporting events (Silveira et al., 2018). Understanding the factors associated with attendees' perceptions of safety is essential for designing policy and interventions to improve both perceptions of and actual safety at sporting events.

Research from social psychology highlights that attendees' perceptions of safety at sporting events could be linked to the extent to which attendees feel part of a group with others. Indeed, feelings part of a group with other attendees has been associated with perceived safety in a range of mass event contexts, including music festivals (Novelli et al., 2013; Drury et al., 2017), religious mass gatherings (Alnabulsi & Drury, 2014; Hopkins & Reicher, 2019), and protests (Stott et al., 2018). Similarly, Cruwys et al. (2020) experimentally demonstrated that ingroup members are perceived to pose lower risk compared to outgroup members. In addition to feeling part of a group, research has demonstrated that attendees of mass events expect other group members to provide support to keep them safe (e.g., Drury et al., 2016). These group processes have also been associated with perceptions of safety at pilot sporting events during COVID-19 (e.g., Smith & Templeton, 2022; Templeton et al., 2020).

The combination of previous literature from social psychology and recent research on sporting events suggests that group processes can help us understand how and why attendees perceive safety at sporting events and identify avenues for improving safety. However, this is limited in the COVID-19 context, and the research has also neglected findings from event organisations suggesting that demographic variables may impact experiences at events.

This research therefore aims to understand how we can make UK sporting events safer by addressing two core research questions: 1) How group processes between attendees impact perceived safety at football events? and 2) How demographic differences impact perceived safety and group relations?

These questions will be addressed across three stages:

Stage 1: Systematic review
A systematic review will be conducted to evaluate the literature to date on safety at sporting events and how demographic variables are considered and/or incorporated into event management. This will provide the core knowledge needed for the thesis and identify knowledge gaps and research avenues for understanding perceived safety at football events. This review will be pre-registered on PROSPERO including the aims, hypotheses, key search terms, inclusion and exclusion criteria, databases, and the analytic strategy. The pre-registration will also be uploaded to the Open Science Framework.

Stage 2: Interviews
Online semi-structured interviews (N = 15) will be conducted with attendees of both men's and women's football to explore safety concerns from the perspective of crowd members. This will also include identifying demographic differences in perceived safety, where the interview schedule will be informed by the systematic review and discussions with key stakeholders. The research will be pre-registered on the Open Science Framework. The transcripts will be analysed to identify key themes impacting attendees' perceived safety with a focus on demographic differences, and to highlight potential avenues to improve spectator experiences of safety.

Stage 3: Large-scale survey on perceived safety
Themes of interest from Stage 2 will be used to develop a large-scale correlational cross-sectional survey (N = 2000) on the factors associated with perceived safety at football events and potential avenues for improvement. The survey will be pre-registered on the Open Science Framework. Structural equation modelling will be used to analyse which variables are associated with perceived safety at events, the relationships between the variables, and whether these differ across demographic categories.