Stakeholder perceptions of aggressive game play in Australian Rules football: surveying the community

Abstract

This thesis chooses to investigate the sport of Australian Rules football, which is Australia’s most popular sport with a long history going back to 1860. In 2023, over 8 million people attended Australian Rules stadiums nearly double the number of rugby league attendances. The sport's aggressive nature continues to attract not only fans who appreciate its physicality and intensity, but also harsh critics who want to game to be banned. The league's code of conduct aims to promote fairness and equality between participating clubs, teams, and players. However, the notion of fairness can be subjective and influenced by a range of factors including individual experiences, personalities backgrounds, and status.

Given the ever-changing AFL game rules, evolving roles of stakeholders, and their highly personal ethics and values, this research adopts a comprehensive, mixed analytical approach to explore how Australian football is perceived as an ethically fair sport within the stakeholder community. After interrogating a range of philosophical approaches and methods for researching sports aggression this study adopts the traditional survey method and the much newer method of interview sentiment analysis.
The findings highlight the significant impact of personality traits and ethics on the perception of aggression in the AFL. Self-transcendence and conservative values foster ethics and fairness, while self-enhancement values encourage violence and aggression. Coaching, parenting, refereeing, fanaticism, and media all directly and indirectly influence players' on- field behaviours, surpassing the influence of culture or other social factors. Lesser contributors to players' aggression include inadequate welfare protocols, rule inconsistencies, and the glorification of aggressive play.

The current Australian football community holds diverse interpretations of fairness, and this finding is related to personal ethics, stakeholder role factors and the constant AFL rule changes in the game. These three dimensions lead to a new model that is recommended to researchers, and stakeholders to both reassess the game's ethics and fairness, and to promote inclusivity and unity within the game for the future.

Date of Thesis submission	2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Western Sydney University
Supervisor	Ray Archee (Supervisor) & Myra Gurney (Supervisor)