Gazing Through a Nationalized Tilt: The Summer Olympics as Validation of the National Connective Motives Scale

Previous measures of nationalism focused more on feelings toward one’s respective country rather than measuring the motives one has for participating in or seeking out opportunities to display national connection and affiliation. Brown and Billings 2017) identified this limitation and created a 19-item National Connective Motives Scale, but it was not fully tested for construct validity. Given that the authors indicated sport as a uniquely ideal lens for examining national affiliation (or lack thereof), the purpose of this study was to utilize the 2016 Rio Summer Games to further confirm the scale’s measurement model, as well as test the scale’s construct validity. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis showed that the motives scale was a good fit for the data, and further analysis demonstrated that the scale achieved convergent, discriminant, and nomological validity.