Measurement
Team identification. Similar to Bhattacharya et al. (1995), we used Mael and
Ashforth’s (1992) six-item measure to gauge spectator identification with the
football team. The scale was adapted to our context by simply adding the
word ``football’’ after the school name or replacing the word ``school’’ with
the words ``football team’’ in Mael and Ashforth’s original scale. A
Likert-type seven-point response scale with anchors of ``Strongly disagree’’
(1) and ``Strongly agree’’ (7) was utilized.