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COPYRIGHT 2007 University of South Alabama
Home advantage in team games has been defined as "the consistent finding that home teams in sports competitions win over 50% of the games played under a balanced home and away schedule" (Courneya & Carron, 1992, p. 13). For major team games, this phenomenon is well documented (for a review, see Courneya & Carron, 1992; Nevill & Holder, 1999). The home advantage observed, although variable in magnitude between team sports, and somewhat reduced over the past twenty years is consistently significant in soccer and across all major North American team sports, ranging from home winning percentages (excluding draws) of around 55% in major league baseball (Adams & Kupper, 1994; Pollard & Pollard, 2005; Carron, Loughead, & Bray, 2005) to around 55-60% for ice hockey and football, 60-65% for basketball and 60-70% for soccer (Carron et al., 2005; Pollard & Pollard, 2005).
Courneya and Carton (1992) proposed a conceptual framework of five major components thought to have an impact upon home advantage. These were game location, game location factors, critical psychological states, and performance outcomes. The present study focuses predominantly upon the impact of crowd factors (a game location factor), where the imbalance of crowd support in favor of the home side is thought to enhance home advantage. Such factors are thought by both fans (Smith, 2005; Wolfson, 2005) and often the media (Smith, 2005) to be the main cause of home advantage. Early studies focusing on crowd size or density had contrasting findings, with little or no relationship to home advantage in soccer (Dowie, 1982; Pollard, 1986) to a positive relationship between crowd density and home advantage in professional major league baseball (Schwartz & Barsky, 1977). More recently, studies in both professional soccer (Nevill, Newell, & Gale, 1996) and amateur ice hockey games (Agnew & Carron, 1994) have demonstrated relationships between absolute crowd size and crowd density respectively with home advantage. It should be noted that the poor model fit in the Agnew and Carron study led the authors to conclude that crowd density accounted for only a small proportion of the home advantage. Further to crowd size and density, a number of studies have used the introduction of domed stadiums in North America, to demonstrate that the consequential increases in crowd noise result in enhanced home advantage in football (Zeller & Jurkovac, 1989). Acker (1997) confirmed these findings, though some reservations were made regarding an inability to differentiate between factors of team quality and location. Likewise, difficulties emerge when attempting to separate familiarity factors (domed stadiums having different conditions) from crowd factors (domed stadiums having louder home support). Several researchers have also established that sports officials make more subjective decisions in favor of the home team than of the visiting team (Greer, 1983; Lehman & Reifman, 1987; Varca, 1980). Nevill et al. (1996) went on to demonstrate that in English soccer, this imbalance of decisions (in this instance measured in penalties and 'sendings-off') increased with crowd size (Nevill et al., 1996).
Such studies led to the conclusion that the crowd may either be influencing players to perform differently, or affecting the match officials' decisions to favor the home side (Nevill et al., 1996). However, recent evidence suggests that a supportive crowd may not result in superior home performance (Strauss, 2002). Further, home players' performance may even suffer when stakes are highest (Wallace, Baumeister, & Vohs, 2005). Recent experimental research has aimed to investigate the latter hypothesis, that crowd noise results in an imbalance of refereeing decisions in favor of the home side (Balmer, Nevill, & Williams, 2001 a; Nevill, Balmer, & Williams, 1999, 2002).
Investigating the influence of crowd noise on referees' decision-making in actual match settings is problematic since it would be extremely difficult to effectively compare referee decisions in different games. Crowd noise and other situational factors may influence a decision specific to each game. In an attempt to overcome this limitation, experimental work has provided strong evidence that crowd noise plays a major role in this imbalance (Balmer et al., 2001 a; Nevill et al., 1999, 2002). In these studies, participants were required to make judgments on pre-recorded incidents, either with or without crowd noise. In all cases, crowd noise as opposed to silence, resulted in an imbalance of decisions in favor of the home side. Participants reported significantly more decisions in favor of the home side in a crowd noise condition compared to a silent condition, either by penalizing the home side less or by penalizing the away side more, or both. The present study extends this line of investigation by exploring the factors associated with inconsistent decisions. One possible explanation for giving more decisions in favor of the home team could be that inconsistent decisions under the presence of a vociferous crowd, in compared to refereeing in quiet conditions, can he attributed to increased stress.
Officials have been shown to exhibit significantly more cognitive anxiety before games than after (Burke, Joyner, Pim, & Czech, 2000). Officials feel that fans are often unsympathetic towards problems associated with officiating (Mitchell, Leonard, & Schmitt, 1982). Evidence demonstrates that making an incorrect decision is the single most important stressor in sports officiating (Kaissidis & Anshel, 1993; Stewart & Ellery, 1998; Taylor, 1990). A...
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