Team Identification: Measurement Invariance over Preferred and Target Team Focus Points (Report‪)‬

The organization of the XVIII Olympic Games in Athens, and the first place finish of Greece in the European Soccer Championship have elevated the interest of Greek sport fans in sports, and especially soccer. The allegiance between a fan and a sport team is an important element of sport consumer behavior models (Madrigal, 1995; Trail, Anderson, & Fink, 2005; Trail, Fink, & Anderson, 2000; 2003; Van Leeuwen, Quick, & Daniel, 2002), but research on fans' behaviors and their allegiance with soccer teams in Greece is almost non-existent. One of the multitude of terms used in various academic disciplines to describe this allegiance has been team identification i.e., the extent to which a fan feels psychologically attached to a team (Wann & Branscombe, 1993). Research on team identification can involve many different points of attachment. Although the majority of work has investigated the identification fans feel for a specific team, fans can also develop a strong sense of attachment with many components of the sporting environment (Holt, 1995; Trail, Robinson, Dick, & Gillentine, 2003). For instance, fans may feel a sense of attachment to the institution (e.g., university) represented by a team (Van Leeuwen, Quick, & Daniel, 2002), the sport played by a team (Hill & Green, 2000), and individual players on a team (Basil & Brown, 2004; Mahony, Nakazawa, Funk, James, & Gladden, 2002). Similarly, examining fans' identification with a team can be more involved than it appears on the surface. Specifically, one could assess various aspects of team identification, including one's identification with a specific target team (e.g., "How strongly do you identify with Team X") and one's identification with a favorite or preferred team (e.g., "How strongly do you identify with your favorite team, regardless of who that team is"). Past work utilizing the Sport Spectator Identification Scale (SSIS: Wann & Branscombe, 1993) that has been translated into Greek and initially validated (Theodorakis, Vlachopoulos, Wann, Afthinos, & Nassis, 2006), has examined identification with both "target" teams (e.g., Wann, Bayens, & Driver, 2004; Wann, Dunham, Byrd, & Keenan, 2004; Wann & Pierce, 2005) and identification with preferred/favored teams (e.g., Wann, Dimmock, & Grove, 2003; Wann, Ensor, & Bilyeu, 2001; Wann, Shelton, Smith, & Walker, 2002).