National Image Of Russia At Web Forum Devoted To World Cup 2018

This article studies the Russian national image constructed during the 2018 World Cup.The author investigates the historical Russian national image and large-scale sports events and their mutual influence.The author concludes that the previous Russian national image was not positive.Generally speaking,Russia is considered to be strong and aggressive country.At the same time,the Russian people are often rated as hostile,straight.Russia have organized many large-scale events(Olympic Games,the Universiade)and their translation through media made image of Russia more positive.This article apply intergroup contact theory as the research basis.The author believes that the contact between local public in the host country of the large-scale sports event and the audience from abroad will affect the image of the host country.In order to know the image of the country formed by the groups of intergroup contact,the author found suitable research data source and used the following research methods.The main research method is content analysis.Through the content analysis of the web forum Bigsoccer.com,which is a special football forum,the author hopes to realize what is the image of contemporary Russia at that forum,and how the big-scaled events influence the construction of national image.In order to achieve the purpose of this paper,it is necessary to define the concept of national image and explore the historical concept of Russian national image.Online forum is a kind of free social media and a resource of public opinion.Generally speaking,the forum has a topic,which can be divided into small topics.Generally speaking,the media can construct the national image through the published information,but in the forum,users share their own experience and knowledge,and can change each other's ideas through interaction.So in the forum,we can study the public opinions of people from all over the world.By studying the public's perception of sports events and national impressions,author investigates how sports events affect the image of the country through group contacts.The data received from Bigsoccer.com includes 3126 responses from different forum users,and total have 56 topics.After deleting the noncompliant data,the final sample size is 535 responses.This research sample contains information and descriptions of Russian facilities,transportation,institutions,Russian culture,etc.This article analyzes the selected information,including the amount of information,frame and vocabulary frequency.The preliminary analysis is that the researchers have identified 8 basic encoding options.Each frame includes smaller themes,a total of 19 small themes.The framework coding process,and the main data analysis tool is QDA Miner Lite software.After sampling the sample,the author encodes 535 answer samples according to the secondary dimension of the topic,and then also encodes the tone of the answer(positive,negative,neutral).The results of this article suggest that this World Cup has touched almost every aspect of Russian life,and the World Cup is far beyond the scope of sports games.The 2018 World Cup was positively influenced Russia's national image,and foreign visitors who visited Russia experienced another side Russia.Author suppose the positive group contact experienced on the basis of successfully held sports games made the Russian national image more positive.