The event experience, hedonic and eudaimonic satisfaction and subjective well-being among sport event participants

The baffling growth in the number of participants in sport events calls for an explanation. Sport event organizers, working on an increasingly competitive market, need to know what factors are important to satisfy the participants and enhance their well-being. Satisfaction is a central concept in consumer behaviour research together with experiences. Subjective well-being (SWB), also referred to as happiness, has made a more recent entry into consumer behaviour research but is gradually gaining recognition as an important concept. The objective of this study is to find out how SWB fits into the framework of consumer behaviour and whether SWB can be explained by satisfaction with the event experience in the context of participatory sport events. It is proposed that satisfaction is better aligned with theories about happiness by distinguishing between hedonic satisfaction and eudaimonic satisfaction. A survey of 7552 participants at five sport events was used to select a subsample of 192 participants, which provides data for testing an SEM model. The model consists of six constructs: Service quality, fun, flow (as components of the event experience), hedonic satisfaction, eudaimonic satisfaction and the dependent construct SWB. The results reveal a good fit of the model. Service quality and fun affect hedonic satisfaction whereas eudaimonic satisfaction is influenced by flow. SWB is explained by hedonic satisfaction, which acts as a fully mediating variable for eudaimonic satisfaction. The conclusions centre on the introduction of two new types of satisfaction consistent with the two facets of happiness and implications for event management.