Spatial Visualization: Community-Level Effects of Sport Industry on Community Resilience

The heightened occurrence and escalation of both natural and human-induced hazards, such as hurricanes, floods, and industrial accidents, have had adverse impacts on community health, well-being, and sustainability. Enhancing community resilience to the hazards is one of the top priorities for researchers and policymakers. The sport industry is a potential economic driver, generating significant tangible and intangible community benefits in region-based resilience development. Despite the community benefits of the sport industry at the community level, there has been limited research that visualized the community-level effects of sport industry on community resilience. This study aims to investigate how the sport industry impacts community resilience in a spatially heterogeneous manner. To achieve the purpose, a geographically weighted regression (GWR) was utilized for conducting spatial regression analysis on a dataset related to community resilience at the county level. The analysis also examined the clustering of 16 distinct sport industries within 67 counties in Florida. The findings of the study suggest that the concentration of 10 sport industries exhibited either a positive or negative correlation with community resilience. Furthermore, these relationships were spatially heterogeneous. Such findings can help sport researchers and community sport policymakers establish localized community sport development policies within regional sport industry sectors.