Abstract:
Objectives. The purpose of study is to explore the socio-cultural impacts of professional football clubs on local residents in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam; then, to find out the differences on the socio-cultural impacts of professional football clubs on local residents amongst the three regions such as Northern, Central and Southern Vietnam. Methods. Data were collected from 1,500 local residents were based on a convenience sample from six cities representative for three regions in Vietnam. After collecting the data, the entire data set was randomly split into two parts for exploratory factor analysis by IBM SPSS version 22.0 and confirmatory factor analysis by LISREL 9.30 in order to confirm the factor structure of the scale of socio-cultural impacts. Then, the research applied frequency, descriptive statistics and one-way ANOVA to satisfy the purposes of this study. Results. Results of the EFA and CFA identified the four impact factors including three positive impacts and one negative impact with a 37-item model provided a good fit to data. In the socio-cultural impact, Community Enhancement & Consolidation had the highest mean score and Socio-cultural & Environment Concerns had the lowest mean score. ANOVA tests determined that two factors exhibited significantly differences amongst the regions were Socio-cultural & Environment Concerns and Health & Socio-cultural Opportunities with p-value < .01. Conclusion. It is concluded that local residents have positive perceptions on socio-cultural impacts from professional football clubs in their communities. Last but not least, as comparing these socio-cultural impacts amongst three regions, the local residents in the Northern region responded their perceptions on both positive and negative were statistical significantly higher than residents in other regions in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
