Abstract:
This study seeks to examine Rio de Janeiro residents’ perception of the socio-economic
impacts left from hosting the Rio 2016 Olympic Games after a full Olympic cycle (i.e., 4 years).
For the first time in history, the Olympic Games were hosted in a country in South America,
however the selection of Rio as the host for the 2016 Games follows an uprising trend of
emerging countries (i.e., BRICS) being selected to host the Olympic Games. Thus, this study
aims to add to the broader literature of mega sporting events impacts on emerging countries, by
introducing a long-term analysis approach. Based on the concepts of the social exchange theory
(i.e., SET) and of the temporal construal theory (i.e., TCT), this study proposes a necessity to
have more residents’ perception studies of mega-events impacts being conducted after a full
Olympic cycle. The results show that Rio de Janeiro residents perceived hosting the 2016
Olympic Games as having mostly a negative impact on their socio-economic life, since 24 out of
the 31 items being analyzed had a lower average than four (M < 4) on a 7-point Likert Scale.
Furthermore, differences between different demographic variables are analyzed under the results
section, while residents’ feelings extracted from the open-ended questions are expressed under
the discussion section.
