Correlates of Participation in Adult Recreational Sports

Abstract

This study basically involves an analysis of factors associated with physical activity as a lifelong leisure activity. The ultimate objective of this type of research is to identify variables that predispose adults to an active lifestyle. The research included three subsamples for purposes of comparative analysis—a purposive sample of tournament racquetball players, a purposive sample of runners who participate in road races, and a random sample of adults from the general population to serve as a type of control group in the statistical analysis. The findings showed that the racquetball players tended to be most involved in the conventional world of sport both currently and during their youth. That is, they had a relatively high rate of participation in organized sports during their youth, and they are currently more involved with the world of sports in terms of reading the sports page in the newspaper and use of sports as a topic of informal conversation. The racquetball players also tended to express the strongest assessment of their athletic ability in terms of natural skills and coordination. The runners tended to be more similar to the general population than to the racquetball players in their overall orientation to sports. The respondents from the general population were, as might be expected, differentiated from runners and racquetball players most clearly in terms of indicators of commitment to physical activity as a leisure role. Moreover, the runners and general population were less likely than the racquetball players to emphasize the competitive, cathartic and social dimensions of sport.