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While sports fandom and social media advertising have been widely studied, and all major, professional teams use social media campaigns for direct sales, there is surprisingly little research on the relationship between fans’ social media engagement behavior (SMEB) and their purchase intention (PI), and none that differentiates PI across different platforms and sports contexts. This study addresses those gaps by exploring (a) how different kinds of fans engage their teams’ advertising on various social media and (b) how those different behaviors predict PI in different contexts. To do so, we utilized an SMEB framework to interpret survey data (N = 452) of U.S. sports fans’ social media engagement with their favorite teams over six popular platforms for two situations—in-game and out-of-game. Regression analyses determined the extent to which those behaviors predict PI across different sports and platforms during and outside of games. Our results show that fan SMEB varies by sport, platform, and situation. Furthermore, we found that information-acquiring social media behaviors—such as checking scores—best predict PI in-game, while fan-identity cultivation social media behaviors—such as posting—best predict PI out-of-game. In addition, PI predictability varies across platform and game situation, but not across age, gender, or even level of fandom. By contextualizing the relationship between fan SMEB and PI, our study lays a foundation to address these lingering gaps in the sport communication literature while providing actionable insights for teams and brands seeking more effective sales campaigns across an array of social media.

Physical activity policy can play a crucial role in ensuring that individuals, communities, and societies can obtain the wide range of health benefits associated with regular physical activity participation. Policies such as Title IX, the Americans With Disabilities Act, and state physical education laws have all increased opportunities for millions of Americans to participate in physical activity. With that said, how policies are developed and implemented vary considerably. The purpose of this manuscript is to contrast an academic conceptual framework with a pragmatic approach for policy implementation. In an ideal world, polices would be developed from foundational knowledge, scaled up to community-level interventions, and implemented in a sequential fashion. However, policy implementation is a disorderly process that requires a practical methodology. The National Physical Activity Plan encompasses strategies and tactics across 10 key societal sectors—and highlights the disorderly process of policy implementation across the various sectors.

Dissemination and implementation (D&I) science can be described as the scientific study of the strategies and mechanisms by which scientific evidence is disseminated and implemented in community or clinical settings to improve outcomes for a specified population. This paper provides an overview of D&I science as it relates to health and physical activity promotion. It provides definitions and specifications for D&I strategies and an overview of the types of theories, models, and frameworks used to advance this work. Finally, this review demonstrated the need for physical activity researchers to (a) test relationships between changes in D&I explanatory constructs and D&I outcomes; (b) determine the utility of D&I strategies, based on explanatory theories, to improve intervention reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, and maintenance; (c) develop strategies to take interventions to scale and reduce disparities; and (d) develop interventions and D&I strategies, in collaboration with those who would ultimately be responsible for implementation.

Physical activity is a health-protective factor that can reduce disease risk in later life. Designing interventions that increase physical activity participation are paramount but need to increase potency and reduce the time to effectiveness. This paper aims to outline one transdisciplinary, team science effort to increase behavioral intervention potency through the integration of the autonomous cognition model whereby data guide each decision in developing a school-based physical activity intervention. Examples of data collected by stage and a summary of potential action steps are provided.

Physical activity programs in school and community settings have the potential to foster positive youth development related to social and emotional learning. However, research findings and best practices that promote these outcomes are often not implemented in practice. The field of implementation science can help researchers understand and navigate the barriers to implementing what we know from research into policy and practice (i.e., to bridge the know-do gap). In this paper, after describing positive youth development, social emotional learning, and their application in physical activity settings, I share reflections from my engaged scholarship with the teaching personal and social responsibility model to illustrate ways my collaborators and I have tried to address the know-do gap. Lessons learned about ways that kinesiology researchers can actively support the implementation of our research in society are discussed.

The team identification–social psychological health model outlines that fans of local sport teams are more likely to experience feelings of social connectedness compared with fans of distant teams. We tested this proposition across two sufficiently powered studies. In both studies, sport fans (Study 1: N = 291, Study 2: N = 430) completed online surveys assessing their levels of identification with a favorite sport team and social connections derived from their fandom for that team. Team localness was operationalized based on team location (Study 1) or responses to survey questions assessing team localness (Study 2). In both studies, the positive association between team identification and social connectedness was not moderated by team localness. This research contributes to the team identification–social psychological health model and our general understanding of fan behavior by showing that the social benefits of being a highly identified sport fan are not limited to fans of local teams.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of required remote work on work–family spillover within U.S. college sport. In particular, we examined the changes in work–family spillover (positive and negative), job commitment, and workaholism as employee’s work environment changed from traditional work expectations to work from home, and if these changes were, at least partially, due to parental responsibilities. Data were collected from full-time, National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) athletic department employees (n = 1,139) in November 2019 and again in May 2020 following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and after the transition to remote work. Results showed that sport employees found a number of benefits associated with working remotely, including a significant decrease in negative work–family spillover. However, employees with children at home reported higher levels of negative family–work spillover after going to remote work. Workaholism was also higher after the move to remote work. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.