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Guided by self-presentation theory and social role theory, this study examines the different strategies elite female athletes used in personal branding on social media before and after becoming mothers. Scholars have investigated the authenticity of female athletes’ frontstage versus backstage representation on social media for branding purposes, but this study further expands on existing literature to review how female athletes would present themselves in the same realm once entering motherhood.

Through a content analysis, researchers evaluated whether there was a shift in three elite female athletes’ (Serena Williams, Allyson Felix and Skylar Diggins Smith) Instagram posts and captions one year before their pregnancy and one year after motherhood. A total of 732 posts were examined and were organized into six main categories: athletic, professional, promotional, personal, motherhood and dual identity.

Results revealed there was a difference in the self-presentation strategies used by the three female athletes on their social media pages. Specifically, the researchers confirmed the presence of a combined role of athlete and mother.

The findings support existing literature on the importance and the challenges of “balancing” a third identity of blending being both a mother and elite athlete as one. Yet, the findings challenge the previous notion that women cannot continue to perform at an elite level and manage the expectations that society institutes of being a “good mother.”

The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), created by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1983, resolves disputes between athletes and national or international sports governing bodies. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the history and functions of CAS, with a particular focus on the ways in which athletes’ rights are threatened by the IOC’s Code of Sports-Related Arbitration.

The author reviews relevant law literature and media sources.

The concept of lex sportiva (global sport law), general arbitration practices and controversies concerning CAS’s impartiality are investigated, and the “strict liability” principle that CAS applies to doping allegations is assessed. This analysis points to a long record of inconsistencies and contradictions in the history and function of CAS. The findings lead to questions of arbitration or litigation; confidential or public proceedings; specialist or generalist arbitrators; lex sportiva or international legal principles; precedential or non-precedential awards; and civil or criminal burden of proof.

These unresolved issues demonstrate how the IOC struggles to maintain supremacy over world sport by promoting sport exceptionalism, and provide possible grounds for athletes’ future challenges to CAS.

The prevalence of sexual harassment (SH) in Pakistan can be traced back to deeply ingrained cultural ideas, myths and practices that justify and normalize such behavior. This prevalence justifies the need to uncover the factors behind this phenomenon.  As a result, a more detailed mechanism of how and why abuse of power (AOP) can influence female athletes' perceptions of SH behaviors is needed. This study aims to investigate the indirect effects of gender stereotyping in sports (GSS) and benevolent sexism (BS) using sequential mediation.

We collected data from 398 female athletes at football sports clubs in Pakistan. The SEM-PM technique was applied to determine whether these factors are linked to an increased risk of female athlete SH.

The direct relationship between AOP and SH was discovered to be positive and significantly associated with SH, where GSS and BS sequentially mediate the relationship between AOP and SH.

This research provided valuable insights and data related to perceptions of athletes of SH in sports in Pakistan that can lead to the development of effective policies and introduce preventative measures. By addressing this problem, study advises sports governance officers and directors to establish policies, protocols and procedures, including periodic training and dissemination of the policy, subsequent review of its effectiveness, and successful reactions to sexual contact. To ensure that criminal and disciplinary provisions are applied by providing specialized training to the staff of sports organizations.

Primary data collection and analysis were focused.

This paper aims to focus its inquiries on the parasocial interactions (PSI) and relationships (PSR) consumers form with personae in online social media communities. The authors extend the marketing literature on parasocial interaction/relationship beyond brands by focusing on personal social media accounts (public student-athletes).

The authors adopt a grounded theory methodology (Glaser and Strauss, 2009) triangulating observational netnographic data (Kozinets, 2010) of 49 public student-athlete accounts on Twitter (34,500 tweets) with in-depth interviews. The findings emphasize that PSI/PSR occur not only from interactions with brands but also through personal accounts on social media platforms.

The investigation reveals that through such social media platforms, PSI/PSR influence consumers cognitively, affectively and behaviorally. In terms of cognition, the data suggest that PSI/PSR can influence opinion, interests, attention allocation and construction of relations, specifically through the availability of in-depth knowledge about the social media persona. Additionally, the research findings indicate that affect-laden messages from persona can alter emotion and mood, induce empathetic reactions and trigger inspiration, especially in relation to the shared interest of the online community of the social media account. Behaviorally, the findings suggest that personas’ messages can direct and inspire both online and offline actions through endorsed behavioral parasocial interactions.

This research focused on one specific social media platform, Twitter. Twitter was specifically chosen, because it is a popular social media platform and allows non-reciprocal relationships. Although the authors feel that the findings would hold for other social media platforms, future research may be conducted to see if there are differences in PSI/PSR development on different types of networks. Additionally, the authors focused on a specific type of personal account, student-athletes. Future research may wish to extend beyond this population to other personal social media accounts, such as fashion bloggers, diy bloggers and others.

This research reveals that PSI/PSR can occur not only from interactions with brands but also through personal accounts on social media platforms. The findings give support for the value of brand spokespersons and brand ambassadors and suggest that brands should take careful consideration into who is chosen to represent the brand.

This paper aims to report process findings of two online inclusive research projects with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). It includes a discussion of the potential benefits and barriers of online inclusive research and its impact on the future of inclusive research.

Two researchers describe the transition of their inclusive research projects from in-person to online formats and highlight how they operationalized the principles of inclusive research throughout these transitions.

Potential benefits of inclusive research include enabling participation of research participants with IDD when in-person methods are not safe or feasible, increasing participant control of the research environment, stimulating participants’ online skill development and reducing geographic and support barriers to participation in research. A barrier to participation in online inclusive research includes people with IDD’s lack of access to online spaces and Web-enabled devices. Additionally, people with IDD have support and communication needs that are not always accommodated by online skills training and access to the internet. To conclude, inclusive researchers need to develop skills and reflexivity specific to online research environments.

Inclusive online research with people with IDD brings unique ethical and methodological challenges that have not been well explored in the literature. Engaging people with IDD in research using online tools expands the terrain of inclusive research, opening possibilities for even greater inclusion and participation.

Inclusive abstract

Two researchers could not do their research studies because of the pandemic. They did them online. The studies were with people with disabilities.

Being online can make it easier for people with disabilities to be a part of a study. They can choose how to be a part of the study. They can also learn more skills.

Being online can be hard for people with disabilities. Some do not have a computer or smartphone. Some do not know how to use them. Researchers may not know how to help people with disabilities to be a part of an online study.

The purpose of this paper is to bring a new scientific theory into practice in the hotel industry.

In‐depth open‐ended interviews were used with eight hospitality practitioners, consumers, and academic researchers.

The article lays out current practices of security and privacy measurements in the hospitality industry and points out the related limitations. More importantly, it provides insights to hotel operators on possible future applications of a new scientific invention and how it could help alleviate the limitations found in the existing security and privacy measures.

The paper raises the awareness of a new scientific breakthrough that sheds new lights to security and privacy strategies in hotel operations. Hotels, which are able to react quickly to gain the first‐mover‐advantage in leading the industry on the application of such technology, will certainly gain tremendous publicity, and more importantly will be the first to create a new level of confidence in the market on security and privacy strategies implemented in their daily hotel operations.

This paper communicates a recent scientific development and its possible applications in the hotel industry. In this way, it bridges the gap between a scientific invention and its real‐world application. It is expected to provide insights for hoteliers who are interested in technology applications.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how non-host cities strategically plan to leverage pre-Games training for the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games to maximize benefits to the city.

Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with key tourism and government stakeholders involved in developing leveraging strategies for pre-Games training in a non-host city. Interviews were conducted a little over 18 months before the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.

A model of the strategic planning of leveraging pre-Games training is presented. Pre-Games training was positioned as a leverageable resource. The non-host city was well positioned to host pre-Games training given its existing sport focus and facilities and its proximity to the host city and its similar climate. Opportunities, objectives, means, and considerations were constantly developed. The city strategically targeted teams to maximize the use of the training facilities and make the most of the value of well-known athletes, while being cautious of overcrowding. The teams had to be secured before strategies were devised to achieve other opportunities and objectives. Short-term benefits included generating tourism through visiting teams and entourages and integrating visiting teams into the local community through education and sport programming. Long-term benefits included building the destination’s capacity and reputation as a place for elite training camps and tourism.

Understanding how to develop strategies to leverage pre-Games training can inform those responsible for developing and implementing pre-Games training strategies and lead to maximizing the benefits to a city or region.

Limited research has examined the strategic planning process used to develop tactics to leverage mega-events. This study provides insight into the strategic planning process of non-host cities to increase short- and long-term benefits by leveraging pre-Games training.

The Internet is used as a tool to seek health information by individuals. Mental health concerns are the high prevalence of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and preventive steps are required to curb the illness. Therefore, to gain more insight into health concerns, it is now a common practice to seek health information on the Internet. This study propose an integrated theoretical model to explore the relationship between COVID-19 protocols and perceived online trust with online health information seeking intention (OHISI) and a moderating effect of perceived severity and perceived urgency.

Data are collected from 325 athletes in the category of individual and team sports through an online survey in a Likert-scale questionnaire. The analysis is performed with a quantitative methodology.

The study reveals the bright side of online health information (OHI), which brings athletes together and has played out with virtual happy hours, meetings and events. The bright side of OHI reflects social, cultural, technological and economic benefits. An OHI chatbot offers bright personalised side information to the individual seeker, which is more convenient and efficient than human capabilities.

The pivotal contribution is the integrated theoretical framework that is derived from multidisciplinary literature to capture the complexity of OHI. Also, it conceptualises the constructs in the context of OHI and COVID-19.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the use of blockchain for identity management (IdM) in the context of the Internet of things (IoT) while focusing on privacy-preserving approaches and its applications to healthcare scenarios.

The paper describes the most relevant IdM systems focusing on privacy preserving with or without blockchain and evaluates them against ten selected features grouped into three categories: privacy, usability and IoT. Then, it is important to analyze whether blockchain should be used in all scenarios, according to the importance of each feature for different use cases.

Based on analysis of existing systems, Sovrin is the IdM system that covers more features and is based on blockchain. For each of the evaluated use cases, Sovrin and UniquID were the chosen systems.

This paper opens new lines of research for IdM systems in IoT, including challenges related to device identity definition, privacy preserving and new security mechanisms.

This paper contributes to the ongoing research in IdM systems for IoT. The adequacy of blockchain is not only analyzed considering the technology; instead the authors analyze its application to real environments considering the required features for each use case.

This paper aims to discuss research and design of learning activities involving activity tracking and wearable activity tracking technology.

Three studies are summarized as part of a program of research that sought to design new learning activities for classroom settings. The first used data from a qualitative interview study of adult athletes who self-track. The second used video excerpts from a designed learning activity with a group of fifth grade elementary students. The third study draws largely on quantitative assessment data from an activity tracking unit enactment in a rural sixth grade class.

Activity tracking appears to provide opportunities for establishing benchmarks and calibration opportunities related to intensity of physical activities. Those features of activity tracking can be leveraged to develop learning activities where elementary students discover features of data and how data are affected by different distributions. Students can show significant improvement related to statistical reasoning in classroom instructional units that centralize the use of self-tracked data.

As activity tracking is becoming a more ubiquitous practice with increased pervasiveness and familiarity with mobile and wearable technologies, this paper demonstrates a topical intersection between the information and learning sciences, illustrates how self-tracking can be recruited for instructional settings, and it discusses concerns that have emerged in the past several years as the technology related to activity tracking begins to be used for educational purposes.