Explaining the Nature of Sport Virtual Social Capital in Social Media Platforms

The goal of this study was to explore virtual sports social capital and its functioning. The research followed a qualitative approach using theme analysis technique. For this, 16 university experts were purposefully selected and interviewed in-depth. The data was analyzed through stages of compiling, disassembling, reassembling, interpreting, and concluding. The results led to the identification of 124 final codes, 35 sub-themes, and 9 main themes. To ensure the coding's quality, five interviewees validated the findings, and an external observer conducted the evaluation. The main themes comprised the nature of virtual social capital, positive features, interactive features, structural features, drivers of production and reproduction, functional features, limiters of virtual social capital, challenging features, and strategies for stabilizing virtual social capital. Based on the results, it can be concluded that sports virtual social capital resembles pseudo-social capital with a flexible and fragile nature, which could have negative effects if all its aspects are not comprehended properly.