gender and age on the active participation in sport of adults. From the analysis of Chapter 2, it appears that age actually has a weaker impact than was previously thought, because much of the reduction in participation reflects the generation in which people were born not their age – current young adults are likely to play much more sport as older people than current older people. In addition to socio-economic status, gender and cohort/age, coming from a sporting family also has a strong influence on whether children play sport.
5.1
Introduction
This chapter uses the individual sporting histories data to examine the processes underlying these other influences on participation in sport. At what age does socio-economic status impact most on participation? What kinds of sports does it affect? Does the influence of coming from a sporting family extend beyond childhood? Are there any previously unidentified factors that influence sport across the life course?
I
n the sample of 3,080 adults involved in the SSPE, educational attainment is the single biggest factor in determining whether an individual plays sport (Lunn, 2007a). Thus, understanding how low levels of education affect sport is a key issue for any policies aimed at increasing adult participation.5.2
The Role of
Education
Figure 5.1 provides the sport hill broken down by educational attainment, separately for team and individual sports. The sample is categorised into three levels of attainment: lower second-level qualifications or below (low), higher second-level (medium) and third-level (high). Because the sport hills are difficult to separate visually at young ages, a separate panel (bottom) is provided that includes the same data only for ages 0-25 years.
Although the strong impact of educational attainment is immediately striking in this chart, the use of just three categories somewhat underemphasises the true effect. For example, the multivariate analysis employs five categories and finds significant differences within the ‘low’ educational attainment category (between those who have no second-level education and those who have lower second-level qualifications) and in the ‘high’ educational attainment category (between those who have a diploma or degree and those who have a postgraduate qualification). Still, for the
INFLUENCES ON PATRICITPATION 45
purposes of inspecting the data visually, three categories is sufficient to communicate the main relationships.
Figure 5.1: Sport Hills for Team and Individual Sports by Educational Attainment 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 Age %
H Team M Team L Team H Indiv M Indiv L Indiv
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 0 5 10 15 20 25 Age %
The outstanding message of Figure 5.1 is that educational attainment primarily affects individual sports and that its influence lasts a lifetime. Those of higher educational attainment in the sample were much more likely to play individual sports as children, young adults and older adults. The gap in participation by education opened up at a very young age, well before 10 years old. Educational attainment is strongly correlated between parents and children and so this early advantage is likely to have reflected the education of respondents’ parents more than of respondents themselves, whose level of educational attainment would not in any case be determined for another decade or more.
Still concentrating on individual sports, the charts make clear the advantage of going on into third-level education. The peak age for playing individual sports among those who left education following completion of
46 SPORTING LIVES: AN ANALYSIS OF A LIFETIME OF IRISH SPORT
second-level was 16 years, after which a slow and steady decline occurred. Contrastingly, going on to college gives a further boost to participation. Educational attainment to third-level is one of the strongest determinants of taking up new sports during adulthood and also has some influence on whether people drop out from sports once they leave school. The rise in individual sports for the high attainment group continued right through their early twenties and then sustained for a considerable period of adult life. Furthermore, those with high educational attainment who eventually dropped out from individual sport during adulthood were more likely to participate again following retirement. (The severity of the retirement effect depicted for the high attainment group should be treated with some caution, as the sample size of highly educated over-65s is small and the possibility of bias resulting from migration is greater for this group. Nevertheless, the effect is statistically significant.)
Turning to team sports, the differences by educational attainment are much weaker, but two statistically significant effects are worth highlighting. First, the low educational attainment group was less likely to play team sports during their teenage years. Multivariate analysis in Appendix A confirms that this effect is confined to those who did not attain any second-level qualifications, many of whom did not attend second-level school at all and did not, therefore, experience the sporting opportunities it offers. Second, there is a definite and noticeable kink in the curve at age 18 years for those of high educational attainment. This might be partly caused by attendance at college prolonging people’s involvement in team sports, but the multivariate analysis in Appendix A suggests that the more important influence on team sports comes from the fact that those with higher educational attainment also have higher incomes and are more likely to go into professional occupations (see below).
Finally, the pattern shown in Figure 5.1 is consistent across cohorts. The picture would look the same if it were plotted separately for each generation, although general participation levels would be lower for the older cohorts. The strong effect of educational attainment on playing sport has existed for more than one generation and is apparently not changing over time.