How Can We Improve Running Events? The IPA4RE Questionnaire and Its Potential Impact on the Experience of Runners

Abstract

The benefits that a positive running experience provides to individuals have been broadly studied by the scientific community, with the finding that running sport events are a facilitating tool to attract more individuals into physical activity. This study focuses on a sport management approach to improve the quality and organizational efficiency of running sports events so that a better experience for runners can be provided. The methods of this research consist of the validation of a new questionnaire called ‘The IPA4RE questionnaire’. Furthermore, an IPA analysis for a specific event was carried out. As our main findings, the most valued aspects perceived by consumers are the event atmosphere, security, event route, and convenience of bib collection and event day information. In conclusion, the IPA4RE can be used as a management tool by running event organizers to make more efficient use of their resources and provide a better experience to participants.

Using Importance–Performance Analysis (IPA) to Improve Golf Club Management: The Gap between Users and Managers’ Perceptions

“…The use of IPA in the sports sector has increased notably in recent years [15,18,19,22,25], including in golf [28,29]. However, although there are studies applying this type of analysis in golf user participants [27], there are no references in the literature that use the IPA on the perception of golf managers.…”

“…Likewise, the use of the IPA is also growing in the sports sector for the assessment of fitness services [15][16][17][18][19], in sports centers according to public or private ownership [20], for tennis users [21] and baseball spectators [22], at hockey camps [23], sporting events [24,25], or managers and students of sports management [26], could be some examples.…”

Why Do We Run in a Sporting Event? A Gender Perspective through the Half-Marathon of Cordoba, Spain

“…Moreover, since the number of items was 22, Nunnally and Bernstein (1994)'s criterion recommended exceeding more than ten cases per item. This technique has been successfully used in previous studies on the motivations and behaviour of participants in sports events (Kruger et al 2016;León-Quismondo et al 2023;Cannella et al 2023). For analysis validation, it was considered that the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) index should yield a value above 0.7 to be considered acceptable (Hair et al 1999).…”