Despite the recent growth in Paralympic sport programming and viewership on social media, there remains a limited understanding of social media users’ motivations for consuming and engaging with Paralympic content. Drawing on Uses and Gratifications (U&G) theory, the purpose of this study is to examine the motivations of social media users for consuming Paralympic content and the relationship between different types of motivations and social media engagement. Our data collection spanned six Paralympic Games, both Summer and Winter, from 2012 to 2022, resulting in the analysis of 1,297 tweets from unique X (formerly known as Twitter) users. Findings suggest that the prevalent motives for consuming Paralympics content on X include information, integration and interaction, political stance, empowerment, inspiration, and entertainment. Regarding engagement, inspirational content is most likely to be liked, while integration and interaction, and entertainment are more likely to be retweeted.

中文翻译：

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个人对社交媒体上残奥会内容的动机和参与度：对六届夏季和冬季奥运会的纵向分析


尽管最近残奥会体育节目和社交媒体上的收视率有所增长，但人们对社交媒体用户消费和参与残奥会内容的动机的了解仍然有限。本研究的目的是借鉴使用与满足（U&G）理论，探讨社交媒体用户消费残奥会内容的动机以及不同类型的动机与社交媒体参与度之间的关系。我们的数据收集涵盖 2012 年至 2022 年的六届残奥会（夏季和冬季），从而分析了来自唯一 X（以前称为 Twitter）用户的 1,297 条推文。调查结果表明，在 X 上消费残奥会内容的普遍动机包括信息、融合和互动、政治立场、赋权、灵感和娱乐。从参与度来看，励志类内容最容易被点赞，而融合互动、娱乐类内容更容易被转发。