Below is a transcript of this audio episode of Inside the Research, featuring sport management associate professor Dae Hee Kwak. It includes some minor edits for clarity.

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Mary Clare Fischer: Welcome to the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology's Inside the Research series, where we aim to expand your idea of what research looks like. I'm your host, Kines writer, Mary Clare Fischer. We have here with us Dae Hee Kwak, a sport management associate professor in kinesiology who studies…

Dae Hee Kwak: Sport consumer behavior.

MCF: I'm going to ask him today about a series of studies that he has done about fan responses when professional athletes share their mental health issues or even take some time away from sports to handle those concerns. So welcome, Dae Hee.

DHK: Thank you for having me.

MCF: So I wanted to start with: What makes you interested in this particular topic?

DHK: For the first project, it was purely from my doctoral student, Zhijing Chen, who is now a professor at Southern Illinois University. She was browsing articles about tennis because we both play tennis, and Naomi Osaka broke out this press release where she decided not to play at the French Open in 2021 because of her mental health struggles or challenges. Before she decided not to play the French Open, she was fined for not appearing in the press conference, which she had an obligation as a pro tennis player to appear in the media and respond to the media's questions.

But she was struggling with her mental health. She was fined $15,000 for not appearing in the press conference. So after a few days later, she decided to say, ‘OK, I'm just going to withdraw from the French Open. I can't handle this anymore.’ So she prioritized her mental health over competing at one of the Grand Slams.

So this brought huge media attention. There was a heated debate on social media where her major sponsors also chimed in whether they show support for Naomi or try not to express any support, for her. So that was an interesting phenomena that we were experiencing. So that's what we really motivated us to tackle a study on this. Let's see how the public, on social media, how people were reacting to Naomi Osaka's withdrawal from French Open.

MCF: And were you interested in this specifically because you follow the the space online and social media around tennis, you and your PhD student?

DHK: My doctoral student, she got really interested in this topic.

The second reason for me personally is actually: I have a close significant other who has gone through some mental health challenges over her course of life. So this is a personally relevant topic to me as well.

So I thought: We don't really hear much about professional athletes who are playing to earn a lot of amount of money and also receive huge sums of money for endorsement deals. We don't really hear much about the weak side or the vulnerable side of those professional athletes. That was another motivation for me personally to tackle this. Maybe we can see how the public or the narrative around this disclosing athletes' mental health illness is changing or how the public views those athletes — if there is any connotation or stigma around it or people are viewing them as more personable, relatable figures.

MCF: Very cool. So when you have done this type of research in the past, when you're looking at consumer behavior, how do you do it?

DHK: So I use a behavioral approach, meaning that I measure how people think, perceive, how they feel about stimuli or reading an article or towards an object. In this case, Naomi Osaka breaking out on the Twitter. So we use surveys, we use an experimental approach or experimental designs to provide a stimuli or article or video stimuli and see how people react and think and how they respond to those types of stimuli.

For this particular study, we wanted to look at all the comments that people had on social media —  now X, formerly Twitter, on the very, issue where Naomi Osaka had broken news about withdrawing from the French Open and how people were reacting to that specific posting. So we scraped the Twitter data on social media and examined what people were saying and what themes that we can extract from those comments.

MCF: What did you end up finding when you scraped the data?

DHK: We looked into thousands of Twitter comments about this withdrawal that happened, and then we wanted to see if the machine learning tool will be able to find out specific themes around those comments.

So we found five total themes. The most prominent topic was the debates on the press conference. People were debating back and forth whether Naomi or other professional athletes should appear at the press conference versus not.

And then the second emerging topic was mental health matters. People were actually using this tweet to make a case and saying how important the health mental health issue is for athletes.

The third topic that we found was: There was a lot of hope for a positive change, urging the tournament organizing committee to make change and to make sure they have some more supportive policy to support athletes going through this mental health challenge. So there were people making comments about hoping for a positive change around this.

And then there were a fourth emerging topic, which was support for the decision. So there were a lot of people actually supporting, saying, ‘Hey, Naom, I love you. We love you. You know, we support you. I'm so proud that you actually prioritize your mental health.’ So there was a lot of support for this.

And then another similar emerging topic, which was the last topic or theme that we found was appreciation. Thanking Naomi Osaka for breaking this out to the public Because there were many people we also found that said, ‘I also struggled with this in my workplace, but I never shared this before. But thank you, Naomi, because now I can have the courage to share this because you had the courage to share this in a field where mental health has been treated as a sign of weakness or something where you're not strong enough. So thank you for the courage.’ So you saw a lot of people also appreciating what Naomi Osaka did.

MCF: Wow. What of those things surprised you, if any?

DHK: What really surprised us was the amount of support, the amount of appreciation, that people actually left on Twitter. Twitter’s not usually the best place to find support for others, but it's a good place to derogate or, you know, trash talk, especially if you talk about sport fans. But this was something that we found interesting and and somewhat surprising — the amount of support and the amount of of appreciation that people expressed on this very topic.

MCF: Love that. We gotta get some more support [on Twitter]. You were then interested enough in this topic to essentially continue the conversation. You ended up doing some additional studies on fan responses that were broader, not just exclusive to Naomi Osaka, but about when athletes were, you know, taking some time off for their mental health issues or or being very vocal about that. Right? So tell me about the that series of studies and how that might have been different.

DHK: We wanted to take it further to see if we were to have an athlete disclose their mental health struggle but try to compare this with another reason for withdrawing from competition such as physical injury, which we see all the time. That’s a very expected norm where, you know, they have a tight groin or shoulder or knee injury, so they're gonna sit out for two weeks, three weeks, or maybe for a month or longer. Do people perceive these athletes differently if the athlete is withdrawing from competition because of the mental health issue?

So we wanted to really compare and contrast if there are any different connotations or different perceptions towards the athlete depending on what type of circumstances that make the athlete withdraw from the competition. So we ran an experimental study. We used the same athlete but different reasons why the athlete is withdrawing from the competition. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to one condition where the reason was because of the mental health. The other condition was just physical injuries that we often see in a news article.

People were assigned to condition number one or two, and after they were exposed to their article, they reported how they felt about the athlete on the dimension of competence and warmth and how they also feel about  mental health in general.

MCF: Very cool. So what did you end up finding when you took a look at this?

DHK: So if you think about the culture within sports where a lot of professional or elite athletes, when they're struggling with mental health conditions, they're afraid of disclosing it to the public because of their fear of not having enough playing time or if the sponsors don't find them to be competent.

So there's a lot of stigma around the athletes, not to mention the general public, but our finding was actually challenging that notion. So what we found from this first study was that athletes disclosing their mental health concerns did not have a negative impact on how people perceive their competence level. So it doesn't really change how they think. And on the warm side, people were actually finding those athletes disclosing their mental health to be more personal and relatable. So they actually find those athletes to be as competent as the other athlete who is going through the physical injury, but even more personable and relatable than the other athlete.

So the second study in this space was then about how fans perceived sponsors depending on how they reacted to the athlete. So if you think about tennis or golf, these athletes, they have a number of different, sponsors who sponsor them throughout the year. No exception with Naomi Osaka.

So when she was going through this media backlash or public media support, there were a number of sponsors that publicly issued a statement to support Naomi Osaka. ‘We support you. Thank you for taking care of your mental health. This is important.’ Nike did. Mastercard did. All these big time corporations came up to support Naomi Osaka, although she was not playing the French Open. But there was a one company, a media company, who expressed, ‘This is her own personal issue, so we're not gonna make any comments.’

So the second study, we got this idea from how the media or the sponsors were responding to Naomi Osaka's withdrawal. So we created an experimental design. One group of participants received an article where the sponsor openly, publicly, issued a statement supporting the athlete that was in the article. And the other group of participants received an article that stated, ‘Here's a sponsor that decided not to make any comments on this because it's [the athlete’s] own issue. Which we labeled as a neutral stance.

We found, as expected, the supportive stance, where [the sponsors] are going to be standing with the athlete and that they’re gonna continue to support, received very positive evaluation [of] the brand whereas the neutral stance was not as high.

So the takeaway from this message: While the sponsors, they can make any comments or they can either issue a public statement of support or say, ‘No comment,’ it's their own decision making. But maybe this is a good opportunity for those sponsors to openly express their stance on this mental health issue and at the same time really, authentically, make a case how much they care about their athlete, which I think carries a long way [compared to] just, ‘Well, this is her own personal issue, so we're not gonna comment on this.’

MCF: Then with these findings, tell me about what the impact of this could be. Why do these studies, why does this research, in your opinion, matter? What can be done with the findings from these studies?

DHK: The broader implication of this line of study is about contributing to the changing discourse or narrative around athletes' disclosure of their mental health challenges. As we explore more research on this topic, what we’ve learned is about 35 percent of elite athletes go through mental health challenges, but not all of them seek for help or openly disclose the challenges because of the stigma around sport culture. So with that in mind, what our findings illustrate is, from fans' perspective, there is not much stigma going around when you control for their individual stigma level.

They consider it [the same] as if you're withdrawing from competing [for] physical injuries, nothing different. But at the same time, the fans actually find these athletes more personable and relatable when they disclose mental health. So there's some implication contributing to the changing dynamics and changing narratives around prioritizing mental health issues just the same as other physical injuries for athletes. And another takeaway point for broader impact is the sponsors. They’re stakeholders around these high-profile athletes, where they spend a lot of money to put their brands right next to these athletes.

But don't just put your logo or your product right next to the athlete. That's why it's called partnership. They’re partners trying to help join this conversation, to broaden the awareness of mental health issues, but at the same time, showing their genuine support towards the athlete. That's what our studies suggest. Don't take it as just a personal issue but use it as a platform. Enhance the public awareness of this mental health issue or fight the stigma around mental health issues.

MCF: So what are your next steps around this topic? Are you doing anything else around it in the future?

DHK: [For this study,] we narrowed down mental health concerns to depression or anxiety, which were documented as the highest types of mental health challenges that that are experienced by athletes. But, of course, there could be some other forms or other types of mental health struggles which we can expand our study into, maybe different types of mental health illness or mental health struggles or challenges that might provide some different nuances or different perceptions toward the athletes.

So that's our next step. And another step is to conduct a study [to see] whether there is a campaign that can mitigate or alleviate or reduce the level of stigma around mental health. Could there be a marketing campaign using athletes or using sport teams [to] maybe dismantle some of the stigma that people have? So maybe that follow-up study can underscore the positive impact of influencers such as, you know, professional athletes or even student-athletes and professional teams around. 

MCF: What do you think people get wrong about the type of work that you do? Are there any misconceptions about the research that you conduct or, you know, the space that you work in?

DHK: Yes. Since the second study that I shared with you is experimental design, we try to control the variables that we are interested in to see how it might change the people's perception. Meaning that it perhaps lacks the naturalistic setting where people actually don't just read a news article. And so there's always a trade-off between having more control in the experimental design versus how much is it relatable to the external world where people don't really have that type of control.

Those are some of the trade-offs and the challenges as a researcher. When you do experimental research, especially in social science, you want to make sure your findings are reproducible. And we also try to conduct multiple studies to make sure that our findings are robust across different contexts, and also, we can reproduce similar outcomes, similar findings.

MCF: Why is it important to you to conduct this type of research more broadly?

DHK: Yeah. That's a great question.

So initially, in the earlier stages in my research career, I tended to focus more on hot topics, some emerging topics in the research field. But I gradually shifted towards under-researched topics that still present important information to understand complex sport consumer behavior. So maybe mental health concern is one area where there's a lot of stigma around it but not much sport management or sport business research that looked at how it might affect the sponsors or consumers in that regard. So that's how we got into this study.

And we're also working on another project with disability, disabled sports, disabled athletes, how they are using the marketing materials. So I would say, nowadays, I'm more interested in some of the topical areas that might receive less attention from the mainstream media or mainstream kind of research — maybe overlooked in the past — but still present important implications for for marketing and also for policymaking as well.

MCF: Why does, more broadly, consumer behavior research in sports matter?

DHK: Because sport consumers are the backbone of the sport industry. If you don't have sport consumers, if you don't have fans to root for your team, root for your brand, buy your tickets, buy your products, you can’t survive.

So that's why I'm studying sport consumers and understanding the intricacies and complex nature of sport fans is always interesting to me. I'm just providing one piece of it — the tip of the iceberg — whereas so much and so many things still remain unknown.

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