Ági Kovács, Olympic, world and European champion swimmer, who was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 2014 and into the immortals of her former university, Arizona State University, in 2015, gave a lecture on her PhD research at the International Conference on Sport and Innovation in Budapest in May this year, entitled Paradigm shift in social communication in the field of elite sport, and in June, you can hear her lecture on a similar topic at the 14th Sport Sociology Conference at a university in Prague.
The champion studied at Arizona State University between 2001 and 2005 (majoring in marketing and communication) and then at Corvinus University of Budapest (majoring in economics, sociology and public opinion research). She is currently the ambassador of the International Directorate of the University of Physical Education, a lecturer at the institution, and has been a PhD student since 2013. In recent years, he has spent his time not only researching and teaching, but also mastering a new, exciting field that suits him very well. He has just obtained an accredited degree from one of the world's top universities, UC Berkeley in California - but let's not get too far ahead. At the very beginning of the interview, he states: whatever will be said in the next hour, the most important thing in his life is his little son, Dominik, who is celebrating his sixth birthday. He comes first, and everything can only be determined in comparison to him.
How is your doctorate going?
This has been a long, interesting, useful and at the same time difficult process in my life. I started my training in 2013. The first two years were mostly about fulfilling the course requirements. After that came data collection, then reporting the results, a procedure that is still ongoing. In parallel, I write domestic and international publications and give lectures at conferences. I would like to mention that I am already very grateful to Dr. Tamás Dóczi, my supervisor. If all goes well, I will finish my doctoral training next year. The relationship between elite athletes and the media in Hungary at the beginning of the 21st century is my research topic. I am investigating this area because I worked on this in America at the time, graduating with a degree in marketing and communications from Arizona State University in 2005, and the topic has interested me ever since.
The world has changed a lot since you started appearing in the media as a novice athlete. People today need a much higher level of awareness in their relationship with the media, they need to schedule and control their appearances in a much more planned way, but they are also more vulnerable at the same time.
Exactly. I was a participant in this at the time, I experienced firsthand the incredibly rapid and intense changes that the internet, and then with the emergence of social media, communication is undergoing. And how this major change imposes different tasks on athletes and media professionals alike. During my sports science research, I get answers to many of my questions and assumptions. The fact that a successful athlete becomes a public figure very early on, in most cases, indirectly, fundamentally changes everything. My research takes place in the present, so it focuses on present-day attitudes, strategies, and back-and-forth effects, but it is also very interesting to explore retrospectively how all this developed.
What do you focus on in your research, what exactly are you interested in?
My dissertation is based on three main research methods. First, I conducted in-depth interviews with top athletes and media professionals. The second important part of my research is a questionnaire survey. The questionnaire I compiled was given to all Hungarian Olympians who qualified for the 2016 Olympics. 104 out of 160 completed the questionnaire, which is quite a high number, but also a lot of valuable data. In addition, 28 media professionals who were accredited by the Hungarian Olympic Committee for the 2016 Olympics also completed the questionnaire. The in-depth interviews were also very helpful in formulating relevant questions in the questionnaires and focusing more specifically on each area.
What did you ask about?
The questions not only addressed how important the athletes consider media appearances, their own media presence, and their attitude towards it, but also how open they are, how comfortable they feel about their appearance, whether they are satisfied with the quality and credibility of their appearance, how they judge themselves in this role, or how they think about the media, the work and attitude of the professionals. Then I asked the media staff the same questions – referring to them. How do they weigh information, what values do they work according to, what are their opinions about the athletes, their motivations, their willingness to cooperate. The third part is the data analysis – which is supplemented by comparing what specific content appeared before, during and after the Olympics in the light of all this in each of the main media.