The Influence of Social Class Background on Childhood Sport Involvement

191 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1984.This study tested a theoretical explanation of how social class background influences degree and kind of sport participation. Two theoretical constructs of social class: life chances-economic opportunity set; and life-styles-social psychological opportunity set were operationalized within the context of sport participation and tested to determine how well they explained the social class/sport participation linkage. Life chances or the distribution of material goods and services consisted of the availability/usage of sport equipment, facilities/club memberships, and instruction/programs. Life styles or values, beliefs and practices consisted of selected parental achievement and gender-role socialization practices that encourage, fail to encourage, or discourage sport participation. Social class background was determined using the Duncan Socioeconomic Index. A self-administered questionnaire was distributed to a stratified random sample of 340 students (80 female athletes, 119 female nonathletes, 80 male athletes, 61 male nonathletes) attending a California high school. The test-retest reliability of the questionnaire was r = .956. Results indicated that social class and gender interact such that degree of sport participation is stratified along social class lines for females but transcends the social structure for males. No linkage between kind of sport participation, as indicated by either the team/combative versus individual/dual nature of a sport or by the expense of participation in a sport, and the social class background of its participants was found. Life chances explained a significant portion of the degree of sport participation/social class linkage among male and female nonathletes but did not explain the relationship among female athletes. Life styles did not explain a significant portion of the sport/class linkage.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD