As the curtain falls on the 2012 London Olympics, athletes and spectators return to their regular routines, some of them with their lives changed, others about to change theirs.
Researchers also return to their—often irregular—routines and for sport scholars, the end of the Olympic Games often denotes the beginning of an Olympiad of research and publishing.
After the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games I engaged in the daunting task of analyzing over 50 hours of Slovenian Olympic broadcasts and an additional 30+ hours of other sports broadcasts. The results of this research were then published in my dissertation, “Telecasting Sports: Sports Broadcasts on Slovenian Public Television,” released and defended in 2011. These findings are summarized in articles accepted for publication in the European Journal of Communication and the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, while several other articles will hopefully soon be accepted for publication in other outlets.
Four years later I am planning new research on the intersection of sport, media and society. The first Olympic-themed international collaboration I am involved in is the Olympic Nationalism Study; coordinated by Dr. Andrew Billings from the University of Alabama, this study aims to find out how different countries respond to the Olympic Games. This study will be conducted in six different countries: Australia, Bulgaria, China, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and the United States. At this stage of the study, I am in charge of collecting data for Slovenia.
Readers from Slovenia that would like to take part in the study are welcome to do so by filling in the questionnaire published on: http://www.1ka.si/a/17728 (the questionaire is in the Slovenian language). Every survey counts as they will help communication scholars understand how one of the largest sporting events affects its audience.
The results of this and other research initiatives I am involved in will of course be mentioned and summarized on this website so keep following simonlicen.com for knowledge and insight into sports media science.