A Study On The National Identity In The Background Of London Olympic Games

:National identity is not only the most important collective identity of a man, the sources of the legality of state sovereignty but also a driving force of the social action. The modernization brings tremendous changes and shocks to the society, with varying degrees, change, disintegrate and reshape the identity consciousness of people, forming the identity crisis. The appearance of national identity crisis may result in discontinuation during the process of modern state construction, affecting the stability and unity of the country. With its unique development history and a wide range of social functions, sports has a profound impact on personal national identity, and is the best field of ideological penetration. And the Olympic Games as one of the most representative events in sports field also has links with national identity. This thesis takes sports as the starting point for an exploratory empirical research, discussing the national identity, media consumption and the Olympic cognition of the respondents and their relationship to each other after the London Olympic Games. As an expletory empirical study, the thesis would afford a practical measure for future construction of national identity studies.The first part of the thesis is the theoretical part of the empirical study which discusses national identity and its relationship between other identity including sports, media sports and Olympic Games in order to provide an analysis thought and theoretical basis for latish research. The second part is the empirical study part. The author combined with the oversea study and concluded that the main factors constitute national identity are:patriotism, nationalism, internationalism, freedom and self-awareness. The data collection work is based on investigation questionnaire. The author use principal component analysis tested the factors’reliability; descriptive statistics methods measured the national identity, media consumption and the Olympic cognition of the respondents after the London Olympic Games; Mean comparison and cross-over analysis to validate the three hypothesis which contain the Olympic cognition, the frequency of consumption and national identity. The three hypothesis are:The more time respondents spent on watching the Olympic Games through the medium, the higher each factor’s score and the stronger of the national identity of them; The higher consumption frequency of respondents, the better cognition them got; The better cognition them have, the higher score of each factors and the stronger national identity they have.The national identity score of the respondents is pretty high after the Olympic Games, it means they have a strong sense of national identity; The more attention they pay and the better cognition they got on the Olympic, the stronger sense of the patriotism, nationalism, internationalism, freedom and self-awareness they got. Also to the increase of the national identity. However, The contribution rate of the five factors that consisted national identity shows a large difference. Among them, patriotism takes the biggest proportion. The respondent’s national identity mainly consists of patriotism, freedom and self-awareness, nationalism and internationalism have a weak influence on it. At last, it shows that media consumption evident promotes and increases the respondent’s national identity, but at the same time it bring to the deviation of the cognitive in Olympic Games.This thesis is subject to the follow limitations. First, there are limited variables in the questionnaires. There could not be any further analysis on the significant variation between the five factors. For the same reason, it could not explain the impact of different media channels and other relevant variables on national identity. Secondly, lack of data collected before Olympic Games. As a result, comparison of the relevant data between the two periods of time, namely pre-Olympic and post-Olympic, can not be done.This thesis is a empirical study and hence there are certain limitations in its research design and methodology. However, the conclusion, to a certain extend, could provide some realistic data for similar research after and help The national identity mode researching in China gets much more mature.