Sport participation among Icelandic Youth: Developmental trends and analysis of social factors affecting sport participation

Abstract

´The sportization of society´ has influenced a massive increase in sport participation, especially among youths. Young people therefore represent the largest proportion of sport participants, especially in formal sports. This is largely due to the impact of the late nineteenth century ideas of sport as possessing positive developmental benefits for participants and for society as a whole. These ideas have become the general viewpoint to youth sport in most Western societies, finding their way into Icelandic society in the late twentieth century. But parallel to the increase in sport participation, the diversity of opportunities to partake in different sports in different contexts has increased extensively. The increased diversity of modern sport forms has illustrated that all sports cannot be put under one and the same label in relation to the developmental outcomes of sport participation. Some sport forms are better equipped than others to contribute to potential developmental outcomes for their participants. Research on Icelandic youth sport shows that while various positive developmental outcomes can be attributed to participation in formal sport in sport clubs, they do not necessarily exist in informal sport, outside sport clubs. Informal sports are more individualistic and emergent in nature and seem to lack some of the social contextual elements that reside in formal sport. Therefore, it is important to disassemble the traditional definition of sport and to differentiate between different kinds of sports forms and contexts. By doing so we can analyze the developmental outcomes of sport participation more thoroughly and accurately. Since prior research has consistently shown the benefits of formal sport participation for Icelandic youth, the focus of this paper is primarily on formal youth sport. This paper seeks to investigate participation trends in formal youth sport in Iceland, and further, to identify some of the social characteristics of participants in different forms of sport, i.e. among those who participate in formal sport in sport clubs, those who only participate in informal sport outside sport clubs, and those who do not take part in any sporting activity. This paper further analyzes whether social stratifications exist in regards to participation in youth sport. The study is built on extensive questionnaire data on the population of Icelandic youth from 1992 to 2014. The findings show that adolescents’ sport participation has increased considerably in formal sport in this period. More adolescents take part in formal sport, and they practice more. In fact, the percentage of those who partake four times a week or more has increased twofold for boys and almost threefold for girls in this period. Boys are more likely to participate than girls, although the gender gap is slowly diminishing. Participation rates in formal sport are highest among seventh grade children and steadily decrease from that point, although participation rates increase in informal sport outside sport clubs from that point on. Those adolescents who stop participating in formal sport do not become physically inactive but seem to shift to informal sport The findings further show that various social characteristics affect the sport participation of adolescents. Participation in formal sport decreases with age, while the relationship is reversed for informal sport, with girls being more likely to partake in informal sport than boys. The findings further show, as the logistic regression revealed, that social stratification factors like parents’ education and family income did not show a siginificant relationship with sport participation. On the other hand, factors like living with both parents, having parental encouragement for sport, and being in a close relationship with friends interested in sport, all showed a positive relationship with participation in sport. The relationship is by far strongest for parental encouragement, where those who receive encouragement for sport participation from their parents are over three times more likely to participate in formal sport, and almost twice as likely to participate in informal sport, than those who do not receive such encouragement. The findings further suggest that there are benefits to participation in formal sport for adolescents’ positive development. This paper is by no means a comprehensive analysis of the social characteristics of youth sport participation in Iceland. Rather, it illustrates the importance for further analysis to differentiate between different sport forms and different sports in order to shed further light on the positive developmental outcomes of sport participation for adolescents. Such research is of extreme importance, especially if social stratification factors prevent some adolescents from participating in a supportive and educational sporting environment, such as within formal youth sport.