This paper examines how participation in physically demanding sport, with its potential and actual injurious outcomes, both challenges and reinforces dominant notions of masculinity. Data from 16 in-depth interviews with former and current Canadian adult male athletes indicate that sport practices privileging forceful notions of masculinity are highly valued, and that serious injury is framed as a masculinizing experience. It is argued that a generally unreflexive approach to past disablement is an extraordinary domain feature of contemporary sport. The risks associated with violent sport appear to go relatively unquestioned by men who have suffered debilitating injury and whose daily lives are marked by physical constraints and pain.
This paper presents findings on the relationship between high school sport participation and involvement in sport as adults. The data are provided by a survey of a large representative national sample of adult Canadians. For different age subgroups among women and men, we tested the school sport experiences hypothesis that sport involvement during the high school years contributes to later adult involvement in sport. The measurement of sport involvement in the high school years is concerned with intramural and inter-school activities. Adult sport activity has three measures: sport involvement per se, involvement in an organized setting, and competitive involvement. The results are consistent with the school experiences hypothesis. High school sport involvement, for inter-school sport activities, is a comparatively strong predictor of adult sport involvement. The effects of high school involvement persist after controlling for correlated social background factors. Moreover, the effects of school sport experiences hold across age and gender subgroups. Although diminished with temporal distance from the high school years, the effects of high school involvement nonetheless extend even to respondents aged 40-59 (i.e., those approximately 22 to 42 years beyond their school years) among both genders. Interpretations of the results are discussed.
This study examines the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and sport and physical activity involvement at different stages of childhood and adolescence in Canada. From the previous literature on SES and health-related behavior, there was reason to test competing hypotheses on the direction of the predicted relationship. The data employed in our analyses came from Cycle 3 of the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth—1998–1999. Results, after controls, showed that SES was a significant predictor of sport involvement among 6–9 year-olds, but not for 10–15 year-olds. In the younger group, the higher the family SES the more frequent was the involvement. The effects of SES were much stronger for organized sport involvement than for participation in an informal context. The discussion bears on the implications of these findings for later adult physical activity and sport involvement and their ramifications for sport and exercise promotion policy.
This paper reports on tests of relationships between participation in organized sport as a youth and earned income in adulthood. The data are drawn from a sample survey of adult Canadians. The results, both before and after appropriate controls, show that those who participated in organized sport as a youth tended to have higher annual earned incomes as adults than those who did not participate in this way. The relationships are stronger and more consistent for males than females across social subgroups defined by education level completed. Further supplemental analyses compare the explanatory import of youth sport participation and other forms of voluntary community involvement as a youth. Also presented are interpretations of the results, which emphasize the “cultural and social capital” and “physical capital” outcomes of involvement in youth sport activity.
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